[Mozilla Enterprise] Firefox msi detection in SCCM

Mon Oct 28 08:14:19 UTC 2019

Hi Matt,

Thanks for indicating the bug report.  I suspected someone else would have picked it up, but it’s good to know they have and your looking into solutions.

Regards

Will

Will Spratt
IT Science Support Specialist
Tel:         01904 46 2631

From: Enterprise <enterprise-bounces at mozilla.org> On Behalf Of Matt Howell
Sent: 25 October 2019 16:28
To: Gustafsson Martin (SEIT) <Martin.Gustafsson at hm.com>
Cc: Mozilla.org <enterprise at mozilla.org>
Subject: Re: [Mozilla Enterprise] Firefox msi detection in SCCM

Installer engineer here. We have bug 1505436<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1505436> on file for this problem. This was a known limitation of the design of our MSI, but I didn't realize how big of a problem it would be in practice. I would like to do something about it, but there's complications, not all of which I know how to get around, that's why this wasn't done in the first place; there are a couple of comments on the bug (numbers 8 and 17) that I wrote to explain what some of those complications are.

On Fri, Oct 25, 2019 at 7:41 AM Gustafsson Martin (SEIT) <Martin.Gustafsson at hm.com<mailto:Martin.Gustafsson at hm.com>> wrote:
In that case, I have some quick suggestions for the MSI “wrapper” deployment.

  *   Turn off automatic updates for the MSI package? Use case for the big majority of MSI installations would be provisioning through SCCM/Intune or other deployment toolset. The user in these deployment scenarios seldomly have local admin access on the system anyway so the automatic update would most likely be iffy.
  *   Run the helper.exe uninstall as a CustomAction in the uninstall segment.

From: Enterprise <enterprise-bounces at mozilla.org<mailto:enterprise-bounces at mozilla.org>> On Behalf Of Mike Kaply
Sent: den 25 oktober 2019 15:11
To: Alexandre GAUVRIT <agauvrit at tranquil.it<mailto:agauvrit at tranquil.it>>
Cc: Mozilla.org <enterprise at mozilla.org<mailto:enterprise at mozilla.org>>
Subject: Re: [Mozilla Enterprise] Firefox msi detection in SCCM

It's not that we don't care it's that using a real MSI won't update properly using our infrastructure.

It's simply not something we can do right now.

Mike Kaply

On Fri, Oct 25, 2019 at 7:17 AM Alexandre GAUVRIT <agauvrit at tranquil.it<mailto:agauvrit at tranquil.it>> wrote:

All these packaging problems were addressed to Mozilla teams many month ago, they just don't care : https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1511835

Don't go with MSI right now, stick to *.exe, since they're not able to release correctly formed packages.

Regards

Alex
Le 25/10/2019 à 13:29, Timo Pietilä a écrit :
If it were a proper .msi and not .exe wrapper all those problems could go away. However I prefer .exe -wrapper that doesn't leave any trace of itself behind than something that pollutes computer with .msi reg entries and leaves them behind when user decides to uninstall program using helper.exe (or ARP that uses helper.exe instead of msiexec /x).

So for all the evils not leaving any trace of it being .msi is the lesser evil IMO.

Timo Pietilä

On 25.10.2019 13.24, Gage, John wrote:
I'm with you on that, Will - I don't feel that this should be "expected behavior" or "by design" for the MSI binaries.  The allure of using MSIs is for classic win32 app consistency and convenience that "msiexec" brings for both installation and uninstallation by using the product code GUID.  At the moment, the uninstaller uses "helper.exe", so I assume that switching to "msiexec /x" would require some work to get it performing the same actions as what "helper.exe" does now.

-----Original Message-----
From: Enterprise <enterprise-bounces at mozilla.org><mailto:enterprise-bounces at mozilla.org> On Behalf Of William Spratt
Sent: Friday, October 25, 2019 6:13 AM
To: enterprise at mozilla.org<mailto:enterprise at mozilla.org>
Subject: Re: [Mozilla Enterprise] Firefox msi detection in SCCM

EXTERNAL EMAIL

Thank for the quick response, Timo and John,

I've had .msi installers in the past that barely did more than populate the application name.  I'm assuming this aspect does something else, and populating the detection method is a side-effect... otherwise I fail to see the point.

To be honest, if I have to populate the setting manually, I might just go back to the .exe method.  Is there any benefit to using the .msi I'm not seeing?

Regards

Will

Will Spratt
IT Science Support Specialist
Tel:         01904 46 2631

-----Original Message-----
From: Enterprise <enterprise-bounces at mozilla.org><mailto:enterprise-bounces at mozilla.org> On Behalf Of Gage, John
Sent: 25 October 2019 10:50
To: enterprise at mozilla.org<mailto:enterprise at mozilla.org>
Subject: Re: [Mozilla Enterprise] Firefox msi detection in SCCM

Just adding confirmation to Timo's comments that using the MSI GUID will not work.
-----
Will, I use SCCM heavily, and for my Firefox ESR Application's "Detection Method", I use the following "Detection Rule" instead of the MSI GUID:

Setting Type: Registry
Hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Key: SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Mozilla Firefox 68.2.0 ESR (x64 en-US)
Value: DisplayVersion
Data Type: String
Radio Button selection: "This registry setting must exist on the target system to indicate presence of this application"

There are many other detection method variants that will work; just keep in mind that if Mozilla ever changes the reg key naming scheme to not include the version and/or lang, this detection method could break.  At that point you can just use the other radio button selection of "This registry setting must satisfy the following rule to indicate the presence of this application" and set the Operator to "Contains" and whatever the version is in the "Value" field.

-----Original Message-----
From: Enterprise <enterprise-bounces at mozilla.org><mailto:enterprise-bounces at mozilla.org> On Behalf Of Timo Pietilä
Sent: Friday, October 25, 2019 5:28 AM
To: enterprise at mozilla.org<mailto:enterprise at mozilla.org>
Subject: Re: [Mozilla Enterprise] Firefox msi detection in SCCM

EXTERNAL EMAIL

AFAIK that is by design. That msi is exe-wrapper and after install there is no trace that it was installed using .msi. You can't uninstall it using msiexec /x {productcode} either.

You need to treat it like if it were installed using .exe.

Timo Pietilä

On 25.10.2019 11.52, William Spratt wrote:
Hi All,

So with the 68.2 ESR release, I thought I'd try pushing it out with
the new .msi installer.

We use SCCM to push out Firefox, and this has worked fine with the
.exe versions, manually configuring SCCM  to check the file version of
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" to verify the
install/update was successful. When we import the 68.2 .msi into SCCM,
it does handy things like automatically populate the install detection
method to check for {1294A4C5-9977-480F-9497-C0EA1E630130} in the msi
directory.  Unfortunately, while the Firefox .msi runs successfully,
   installing/updating to 68.2, it doesn't detect that reference in the
.msi directory.

Has anyone else experienced this?  Should I log a bug report?

Regards

Will

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