Silent Mode - Switches CES to Silent mode to enable you to configuring the application without any interruptions from various alerts in your computer. The operations that can interfere with users' silent mode experience are either suppressed or postponed. In silent mode: Defense+ / Firewall alert is. Silent Installation using cmd/batch file. I need to run an installation of a Setup.exe in silent mode using command line. I am using the below in my batch file. What I need is a silent unattended installation. But when I run the above command, it is not a silent installation and I need to press Next button etc. During the install. A silent install is a non-intrusive method of installing the agent software on devices. That is, there are no messages or windows displayed to the user during the installation. This also ensures that the correct settings are applied to all devices. Using Defender for Identity silent installation, the installer is configured to automatically restart the server at the end of the installation (if necessary). Make sure to run silent installation only during a maintenance window. Because of a Windows Installer bug, the norestart flag cannot be reliably used to make sure the server does not. Runs InstallShield Silent to execute a silent setup. Prevents a network connection and Setup.exe from closing before the setup is complete. This switch works with setups originating from a Windows NT server over a network. Please note that SMS must be uppercase; this is a case-sensitive switch.

Ever wonder what really goes on during a software installation? When you click Next, Next, Finish, what really happens under the covers while you watch that progress bar slowly creep from left to right? The reality is probably far less interesting than you'd think.

At its core, a software installation is little more than a really big file copy, along with a set of registry changes. Indeed some installations perform special activities like installing drivers or registering ActiveX controls. But at the end of the day, even these 'special' activities are still not much more than file copies and registry updates.

I wrote an article for this site not long ago titled. In that article, I talked about some of the ways to automate this process. In every way, one of the biggest tasks is in getting that software installation to run silently. In a silent installation, everything that happens after you initiate the installer occurs without interactively prompting the user. Some dialog boxes might pop up, but they'll disappear on their own. Eliminating anything that requires the user to enter data or click a button is what makes a silent installation so powerful for automating software installation.

That power comes in distributing software through an automated tool. Many of such tools exist on the market today, including one that's built directly into Active Directory Group Policy. Using Group Policy Software Installation (or any of the other solutions) in combination with a silenced installation, you can fully eliminate all the time-consuming manual steps required for handling your user's software.

Today's software installations are most commonly distributed with one of two file extensions. Silencing the first, those with .EXE extensions, tends to be a slightly more challenging process. EXE-based installations do not have a universal switch structure for sending instructions to the installer as it goes about an installation.

Installations with the other file extension, MSIs, tend to be much easier. That's the case because MSI-based software installations all share in a universal switch structure. Sending instructions to an MSI-based software installation requires learning only a single syntax. That syntax looks generally like this:

msiexec.exe /q /l* {logfile.txt} /i {setup.msi} {NAME=Value}

MSI Switches, the Guide

Let me first spend a minute breaking down what you're seeing in the string above.

msiexec.exe ' Commands to the Windows Installer service are invoked with msiexec.exe. This command can similarly be used for patching or uninstalling software as well.

/q ' This second switch instructs the installer not to show its graphical user interface during the installation. This is the most important switch for instructing an installation to run silently.

/l* {logfile.txt} ' This third optional switch tells the installer to log everything to the file found at logfile.txt. You can insert a full path into logfile.txt if you wish. While this switch is functionally optional, the log file data it produces becomes invaluable in troubleshooting an installation that doesn't complete correctly. Since the installation is silenced, the data in this log file often contains the only clues you'll ever get about what problems the installation is experiencing.

/i {setup.msi} ' This fourth switch points Windows Installer to the MSI file that contains the software you want to install. The contents of {setup.msi} can be either local to the machine or remote via a UNC path. This UNC path support is extremely useful, because it enables you to store your software installation files on a file server somewhere and invoke them over the network.

{NAME=Value} ' This fifth and final switch is the most challenging of all. While every MSI leans on a universal structure for sending commands to the Windows Installer, every installation is obviously different. Installing Adobe Acrobat, for example, requires an entirely different set of questions than does installing Microsoft Exchange. This final switch identifies those specific characteristics that are unique to each MSI installation by name and value, and enables you to set them at the command line. You can think of {NAME=Value} as your means for supplying the answers to the installers questions before it asks for them.

So, for example, if you wanted to install the Adobe Flash Player to your desktop and had the correct MSI available, you might do so with the following syntax:

msiexec.exe /q /l* logfile.txt /i Install_Flash_Player_10_Active_X.msi REBOOTYESNO=No

But wait a minute: That command line above contains all the universal switches one might expect, except it ends with this fairly non-standard 'REBOOTYESNO=No' switch that's standing in for {NAME=Value}. Where did that come from?

Sleuthing for Custom Properties

As I mentioned earlier, each MSI has its own custom name and value pairs that answer questions the installation requires. Those pairs might identify an install folder, or add a license key, or in this case instruct the installer to prevent a post-installation reboot. The hard part with these name and value pairs, as you can surmise, is in discovering what they actually are.

Comodo Silent Installation Switches Instructions

MSI in all its universal configuration amazingness does not have a simple way of interrogating an installation to identify its custom name/value pairs. One published method to do this requires downloading the Orca database editor from Microsoft. This database editor has the ability to peer into an MSI to identify its characteristics. It can also edit those characteristics as a highly-advanced function, although doing so is an exceedingly complex activity.

In fact, even getting the Orca software requires multiple steps. You'll first need to download the Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4. Once downloaded, install the SDK's debugging tools. You'll find Orca, which is itself a separate installation, in Program FilesWindows SDK7.1BinOrca.msi. Double-click this file to install it to your management desktop.

Figure 1: Adobe Flash Player's MSI inside Orca.

Once within Orca, you can open an MSI and peer around to locate its custom settings. Decision power harvey kaye pdf. Take a look at Figure 1 where you'll see that the install_flash_player_10_active_x.msi installer has been loaded. Remember that MSIs are above all big databases of content and configurations that apply files to disk drives and keys and values to registries. Orca exposes these databases for what they really are.

Inside every MSI is a table called Property. That table identifies all the properties that are tagged to an installation. The name and value pairs discussed above are in fact properties (along with their values) as seen in Orca. Figure 1 shows a the RebootYesNo property that's configured in the Flash Player MSI installation by whomever created the install. Its value defaults to Yes. By setting REBOOTYESNO=No, you are effectively telling the installation to go about its business with every default p