I am using Installshield for the installation of a product.
I am attempting to find a way to verify an active internet connection before I continue with the installation of my product.
I checked all over, even the manual/help guides from the Installshield people.
I am setting "Program Features" through the Installation Designer->Setup Design->Program Feature(s), and figure if anyplace, it would be in here.
Has anyone worked on this before, and found a viable solution?
ps: I am also trying to find a way to check for minimum system requirements as well (NOT THE O.S. Version, just simple things such as minimum physical memory and minimum RAM)
Much Appreciated,
-Kyle
It's possible, but I wouldn't do it in an install, I would do it in the application as the state of the internet connection could change after the install is performed.
I'd also want to clearly understand why this is required before implementing it. For example I have no direct internet access ( by design ) where I do my software development for security purposes. If I couldn't install or run software because of that, I simply wouldn't buy the software.
Then there are security implications of software applications and installs phoning home and hence why I stay disconnected from the internet on certain machines.
That said, to test for an internet connection, you first have to define what that means. Perhaps you have a public web service that you want to invoke?
Related
I have a bunch of TeamCity agents (Windows, Linux, AWS, OpenShift). To have consistent state it is desirable that all of them have the same software+version installed. Manually checking them is very tedious
Hence I have decided to have an application which shows this information as a dashboard, i.e. a snapshot view of all the agents and the software installed on them. I have decided to use Python(v3.6) for the implementation. I am not a hardcore developer hence this will be learn and do project for me.
I was thinking of some sort of a code-base on all agents that would fetch the necessary details for that agent only.
I will then have a central server that will utilize this data from each agent and then display it in the form of a dashboard.
Please let me know if the above design is the proper way of doing it or please suggest some alternate if any.
If I can have some pointers as how to go about implementing it that would be of great help.
If you have full control over the agents' machines, consider using Ansible to enforce the desired configurations. In general it is much more convenient an safe to control agents' configurations rather than ask them if they have proper ones. And with Ansible or similar configuration management tool you can do this in a scalable way.
We (ISV) are currently planning to offer our software on a rental/subscription basis as a service.
It's a native Windows (C++ / .NET) B2B application.
Our software needs access to the file system (drives) on the customers computer and it also needs access to the network (e.g. be able to find other computers in the network).
We want to offer our customers a service where they do not have to bother themselves with setup/updates and always work with the newest version of our software. So we need a single point of maintenance.
In the first phase we do not expect a lot of our customers (let's say 20) to change to this model, so it would not be a problem to have to set them up and manage them manually, but in the long run a solution that allows an automated set/sign up process would be required.
What I found most promising was Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp with VM hosted Apps and personal vDisks, but it seems that the Citrix solution is not able to get access to the network on the client PC (I tried it with the trial in the Azure Marketplace). Also it seems to be high priced.
What would be other possible ways to meet these requirements?
Unless you can make some significant architectural changes to eliminate the need to access the local filesystem and and eliminate the need to do local network browsing, I would recommend focusing on optimizing your local installation and update process. And skip the virtualization/service idea "for now".
You can still go to subscription model with a locally installed application. Just require your application to "phone home" to check its licensing/subscription status on startup.
I have a number of Windows servers at work that are used for staging web sites for clients while they are being created.
I wanted to start using versioning on them so that when we work with outside vendors on a project, if/when they overwrite my work, I'd like to be able to go back and get the version before.
My question is that I think I'm not looking for the correct terms in searching for information, but what kind of resources are there to learn how to install the software for versioning or a site to help me get started.
Any and all suggestions would be appreciated.
Steph
Since your development workflow can be decentralized (as in "there isn't always one central repository), DVCS tools, with their common tasks described here) can be more adapted.
Git-Scm
Mercurial (see HgInit.com for a very good tutorial like the kind you are after)
Plastic SCM (which has a DVCS nature)
I'm setting up an Internet-facing ASP.NET MVC application, on Windows 2008. It uses SQL Server 2008 for its database. I'm looking for best-practices for securing it.
I found this article, but it's a bit dated now. How much of that advice is still valuable?
Some background -- it's a personal site, behind my home NAT/firewall box; and I'll only forward ports 80 and 443 to it. The IIS server itself is a Windows 2008 host running on HyperV (I only have one physical box to spare).
One useful thing that's mentioned in that article (which had occurred to me already) is that the IIS box shouldn't be a member of the domain, so that an intruder can't easily get off the box. I'll be removing it from the domain in a moment :)
What other tips should I (and anyone deploying to a bigger environment) bear in mind?
I know that this isn't strictly a programming-related question (there's no source code in it!), but I guess that most programmers have to dabble in operations stuff when it comes to deployment recommendations.
You might take a look at these two tools:
Best Practices Analyzer for ASP.NET
SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer (even though you are using 2008, still might be of help)
I don't know about removing it from the domain, but I'd certainly disable LanMan hashes, keep the system fully patched, and use good password security. Make sure that any processes running in IIS run from least privileged accounts, i.e., don't run the worker processes under IDs that are in Local Administrators.
This will be of great help, certainly:
Microsoft Web Application Configuration Analyzer v2.0
Is there a detailed guide which explains how to host a website on your own server on linux.
I have currently hosted it on one of the commerical web-hosts.
Also the domain is registered to a different vendor.
Thanks
This guide is probably more info than you really requested, but webserver information is in there. It's Gentoo-specific, but you can apply the same information with minor translations to any other distro.
I would look into installing apache
99% of linux distributions will have a package for it.
On ubuntu you can run:
sudo apt-get install apache2
Are you considering hosting a web page locally for the internet? Or is this just for development etc..
If it's for an internet server, you will need a stable internet connection with a good upstream.
You may also need a static IP address so you can setup DNS to point to the right place.
While I don't have an url to a good tutorial in english, I would just warn you that this is not something you should take lightly. Administrating a server involves getting your hands dirty in linux stuff and dealing with security can be pretty complex depending on your knowledge and requirements.
So if you know nothing about it, you should be very careful and if the website you host has is of any commercial importance you are probably better off hiring a server admin.
Just to point out; if this is a personal (home) server, as opposed to one in a corporate environment, then it's better not to bother hosting it - you won't necessarily have the bandwidth, and your ISP may not allow it.
As mentioned above, you will also need a static IP address, and you'll need to set up DNS records to point to the correct location, which your domain vendor may or may not help you with.
I think it depends on how familiar you are with linux. Certainly, many people do this for hobbyist websites.
There are many aspects involved - you should begin with something simple like getting apache running and visible to the outside world.