Install Location Issues

[Zaide_Chris 1]

I am posting this after having to remove extra installs of Media Browser Server as it was installed multiple times. The first time I thought every thing was good but the next time I rebooted the computer I couldn't find the program nor was it started so I RDP in this time on my account and installed it again, but once again when the computer was rebooted it was not installed for the media user account. Now there was a UAC prompt so I expected the server to be installed for all users cause why else would you need one? But I figured there was something fishy going on so I looked in to the %LOCALAPPDATA% of my account where more and more programs are installing to get around UAC prompts even though you had one. Nope not there so I looked at the %APPDATA% of my account and what do you know it's installed there in the roaming app data so I start the exe under the media user account and it's taking forever to start almost as long as the install so I look and it's installing it's self again in the current user's account, now I know many users only have one account and most don't even have a password on that account, but there must be a better way to do this and working around UAC in this way makes having a computer properly set up with an admin account and a account for each user harder.

 

Installing in to %ProgramFiles% seams like the best idea but I know current the consensus is it's to much work to get Media Browser Server to install there and not require a UAC prompt for updates (I do understand this is a small team working for free or at most donations and Google is a huge company, but it must be possible as Google Chrome when installed for all users installs to %ProgramFiles% or %ProgramFiles(x86)% on a 64bit PC and it updates automatically and the only prompt I've ever gotten from Chrome on the 8 Windows 7 computers I have running at home was during the install.)

 

So installing to %ALLUSERSPROFILE% or "C:\ProgramData" on most PCs would be the next best and it would be much better then %APPDATA% which is for roaming settings which means if the computer is part of a domain the files setting are to be copied to every computer the user logs in to before the desktop shows adding mins if not an hour to the log in time.

 

At the very least if you insist on installing a copy of Media Browser Server for every user you should at least install to %LOCALAPPDATA% instead, but this still means that each user has to install a copy of the server and that user must be logged in to run the program.

 

I plan on grabbing the source from github and seeing if I can help fix this but I have very little experience with C#

[ebr 14958]

There is lots of discussion about this in the forum already so I won't go back over it but the reason we go to appdata is for our automatic update routines.

 

The server actually will always install to the admin user's directory though, so you shouldn't end up with multiple instances of it.  Basically, we are trying to avoid people installing multiple copies of the server as you should only ever need one on any given machine.

 

In your situation, I would say the best thing to do is to install it under the admin account and then run it as a service.  That will make it available to all users at all times without multiple installs.

[Koleckai Silvestri 1150]

If you want to attract enterprise-level users, you're going to need to fix this issue eventually. Since you're fixing it for Linux and Mac, why not just fix it for Windows as well?

[ebr 14958]

As I stated in the previous discussion, this simply isn't a high priority for me since what we have works for the vast majority of our users.  

 

I know it could probably be improved, it is just not an easy thing to do - especially since any change in our install location will make our current update routines not work which means everyone would have to do some sort of manual process to fix it or we'd have to write some sort of special migration routine.

 

However, the source is open and anyone who feels they can improve the installer and still meet all of our requirements (zero option install and completely unattended updates without any special measures on the part of the user) and make it so that current systems will update properly, is more than welcome to do so.

[Luke 37238]

Well for linux and mac there's nothing to fix. Their installation procedures will be completely separate.