OK, enough ranting about the past, now it's time to talk about InstallWatch and InstallRite. I first discussed about these programs in my papers "A poor-man Tripwire-like system on Windows 9x/NT" and "Computer snooping using InstallRite". This time, I'm going to talk about the proper use of these softwares. They both do the same thing, although InstallRite have one more feature. Both are freely available from www.epsilonsquared.com.
What it does is rather simple, and efficient. The first step is to make a full database of your system, including files, folders, date stamp of files, and CRC check. It does the same with the Registry. Then you install a piece of software on the machine. Then you perform another scan of your machine hard drive, and any changes reported compared to the initial scan is considered to be part of the software installation. We it is finished, you get a complete image of the trace left by an installation package. InstallRite will even let you build an InstallKit, which is a self-extract file that will copy all files and registry entries as they have been identified as part of a software package. You can also use this to perform uninstalls.
This is interesting, because it is not a sequential script or a batch file like we saw earlier. In fact, it is much simpler than this, it gives you the final result of the installation process, not the process itself. This means that you can install a piece of software, configure it to suit your needs, and then make an InstallKit containing all your custom settings. You are now ready to install this little baby on your machines. It allows PATH redirection, so if some machines have different path names, it will still be working. You can specify what action to take when encountering existing files, and force or prevent rebooting after install (if you leave this blank, it will reboot only if needed).
This is really interesting, because all you have to do is build one version of every software package you want to deploy for each different Windows platform you may have (95, 98, NT, French version, Spanish version, etc.) on your site. Then, you simply make these InstallKit run on your PCs, either through the network, or with a CD. You can even make a script or a batch file that would call a bunch of InstallKit one after the other. That is, at least, in theory. Let's see if it can live up to its promises.
4. And the ugly
6. The experiment
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