Hello everyone,
I would like to voice some of my experiences with installing NI software, and it will probably turn into somewhat of a rant (hence the title).
First of all, let me give a short introduction. I work at a small research center as programmer and sysadmin assistant, and we recently received the NI Academic Site License Upgrade Pack for Fall 2010. I was thus given the task to update the NI software on our 15 computers.
I should also say that we do not use a VLM since we have a campus license with a single license number.
And now to my complaints:
1) Knowledge-Base articles somewhat out of date: The KB articles about automated installation are not really that helpful. The gist of the two articles (single installer and suited installer) is to "run 'setup.exe /h' and use those options". The article about the suited installer does not have any information about the new XML spec files (or rather, there is no article with details on the format of XML spec files); all spec file info there is, is about the old INI format. To customize the current suited installers, that is not very helpful.
Additionally, none of the KB articles mention anything about Multi-DVD-installers. I had to look around the forums, which yielded not much help either, and ended up finding a VLM-related article stating that if you want to install from network, you have to name each DVD's folder exactly the same as the DVD itself. (It should also be mentioned here that it would be helpful to tell users how to modify the XML spec file to look for the additional DVDs in certain folders.) Even doing that, I am now noticing that the installation did not work out properly.
2) The device drivers suited installer is out of date: Unlike the other suited installers, this one is still using the old pre-2.6 format (complete with INI spec file). This is not only a hassle when customizing installation (different spec file generation method, different command-line call in the batch file), but it also does not support the output of a results file, which i have come to appreciate much in the other installers. It only has the possibility to output a log, and to simply check whether everything worked okay, the log file is practically unusable. (~4MB log file vs ~15kB results file of newer installers).
3) Automated installation without VLM needs better support and documentation (or: spec file generation is stupid): As I said, we don't use VLM here, but we would still like to use automated installation. As I said above, the KB articles are of little help there. Moreover, the "generate spec file" mode of the new suited installers (in case of a multi-dvd-installer) does not ask "Where is all the data from the other dvd(s)?" -- and in silent mode, it will not prompt during installation but just silently fail.
I have to say that I actually like the generation mode of the pre-2.6 installer better (even though I said above that it should be updated), because it displays useful tips and asks exactly the kind of questions required for silent installation).
4) Automated uninstallation needs to be more flexible: Similar to the installer, the common NIUninstaller can also be batch-called. However, it does not support any kind of spec file input, or help you with setting up automated uninstallation.
Since our workstations are used for different tasks, it sometimes happens that not all have exactly the same configuration (this includes that not all NI ASL packages are installed everywhere). The current uninstaller, according to its documentation, will fail if you pass it a package on the command line which is not installed. In my opinion, it would make much more sense to just ignore unknown packages. The way it is now, I cannot reliably create and automated uninstaller because i would still have to check if it did uninstall all i wanted (it also does not generate any log file that I know of).
5) ASL Upgrade packages should come with better instructions: The ASL package only comes stating that, if you want to install the software automatedly on multiple computers, please use VLM. Great, that does not help me much. There should be more instructions for automated installation, especially since NI exactly notice that we have a campus license and thus most probably will install the software on multiple computers. I do not expect a whole book detailing every step of the installation, but a quick guide and/or links to the right (and updated) KB articles would be very nice.
To conclude, I have to say that I probably said some unjustified things which were just hard for me due to my limited knowledge of automated installation. I'm sure some parts are much easier when you know where to look it up or what to place where, and after making two or three such upgrades you probably know a lot more about it all.
However, quite frankly, NI software is not exactly cheap. Ideally, together with the upgrade package (be it as disc, via email or as link to download it), we should receive a "complete installer" which only needs to know where on the network all the files from the DVDs are and it then installs all the software from those DVDs completely.
I post this publicly because I would like to hear opinions of other users and admins, about their experiences with NI software installation and the points I detailed above.
Best Regards,
Patrick
