im having a hard time deploying a compiled service MSI for windows, im basically getting an error related to not having the right permission to create a system service, ive tried with the local system account and a user that has the privilege to logon as a service and i just cant get it to work, an old version or service shouldnt remain, im deploying with PDQ not sure how much that would matter

Is this an error that looks like

Verify you have sufficient privileges to start system services

?

yeah thats the one

That’s an generic windows error that covers any problem with service installation (not just permissions)

actually its a bit different

All the occurrences I’ve found have been traced to what I can only describe as a bug in service manager. Did you have a version of this service installed prior?

i think so, im doing both an uninstall and an attempt to clean up the old services with powershell just in case

The only fix I’ve found is to reboot after the uninstall.

gross

This seems to happen if the service control panel is open, when you uninstall a service. This leaves that service in a weird limbo state. Subsequent installs fail with that, until it’s been rebooted.

ok that must be why its not every host

I haven’t seen it happen in normal MSI upgrade/repair stuff. Only when people do uninstall/reinstall testing with lots of control panels open, and whatnot. Which, frustratingly, means I hit it randomly testing

ah ok so to do an update do i need to uninstall reinstall or is the launcher msi upgrade aware like how some tools are, the one that comes to mind for me is the splunk UF

I have no experience with splunk.

im just using the package-builder to build the msi, but i could see why that wouldnt be supported

But generally speaking, launcher will update itself. The MSI doesn’t change versions, but launcher will download and exec the newest versions. (If autouodate is enabled)

yeah we cant use the auto updating function

Ah.

so ive just been pulling the windows releases from github and using package-builder

What does upgrade aware mean? I think you should be able to install a new MSI straight over the old one. The various product and upgrade guids should be set correctly for that to work

ok yeah so for example to upgrade the splunk uf you just run the new installer, no uninstall

Yeah, that should work.

ok cool that should make things easier

Why doesn’t autoupgrade work in your environment?

were an airgapped environment

Yup… You could run a notary nd download server internally, but I can’t really recommend that work.

yeah its not too bad to run package builder and then use our deployment tools to distribute it

I’m glad

package-builder

is working for you

yeah so far so good