Silently Installing Discover Components

Overview

In many cases, administrators must deploy the Gimmal Discover connector/agent components to user workstations in order to facilitate an eDiscovery request or enforce a retention policy. In order to silently perform this installation an administrator must record all of the setup options and then distribute these recorded steps, along with the components, to the workstation using a software patch management tool.

This document describes how to record the settings for both the EXE and MAI installers, and how to trigger the silent installation process after all of the components have been distributed.

Note: If you choose to use the MSI installer, the Connector service will show up it the Windows App list for a user. If you would like to avoid having the software show up as an app, use the EXE installer method.

Silent Installation Using the EXE Version

Follow these steps to record the setup options:

1. Download the “Connector Setup for Windows Executable” found in the Administration/Download Center/Connector area of the console to an administrative workstation that you can use to build the recorded files.

2. Launch a Windows command prompt as administrator, change the directory to the location of the downloaded setup, and type in the following command:   >connector_setup -! -r

3. This will initiate the Connector installation in “record mode”. Follow the steps of configuring the connector and choosing the agents. If you choose any searches (people/data targets), please note that those are not recorded and will not be applied to the machines where the silent install is run.

4. When the setup is complete, the files silent.xml and silentInstall.bat will be created in the folder C:\$Sherpa Software\Altitude\Connector

5. Gather those 2 files and the Connector_Setup.exe (from step 1 above). These 3 files together make up the required files to deploy silently

Follow these steps to silently install the Discover components on a workstation

1. Distribute the three files from the steps above to any location on the machine where you would like to silently deploy.

2. Launch a command prompt as administrator, change your directory to the location of the above files, and type: >silentinstall

3. This will silently launch the Connector_Setup batch file, extract and deploy the connector, and setup the configuration files to silently download and install the agents with the options specified in the silent.xml file

Discover does not provide a facility to distribute these installation files, most clients use a patch management tool such as Microsoft SCCM to perform this step.

Silent Installation Using the MSI Version

As a reminder, you'll need to manually run the MSI once on a clean workstation to record the silent.xml file that contains all of the user prompt responses required during installation.

1. Download the “Connector Setup for Windows MSI Version” found in the Administration/Download Center/Connector area of the console to an administrative workstation that you can use to build the recorded files.

2. Launch a Windows command prompt as administrator, change the directory to the location of the downloaded msi, and run the following command:   Sherpa Connector.msi

3. This will initiate the Connector installation in “record mode”. Follow the steps of configuring the connector and choosing the agents. If you choose any searches (people/data targets), please note that those are not recorded and will not be applied to the machines where the silent install is run.

4. When the setup is complete, the file silent.xml will be created in the folder where you ran the installer msi

5. The MSI and the silent.xml file together make up the required files to deploy silently

Place the MSI file and the silent.xml file in an installation folder and issue these commands:

To Install:

msiexec /i "c:\installers\Sherpa Connector.msi" /qn INSTALLDIR="C:\Program Files (x86)\Sherpa Software\Sherpa Connector"

To Uninstall:

msiexec /x "c:\installers\Sherpa Connector.msi" /qn /l*v c:\uninstall.log

You may need to edit the example commands shown above to make the C:\installers portion of the commands match whatever folder you have placed the MSI and silent.xml file into

After the commands finish, the services should show up in the local machine and the Connector software should show up in the Windows App list in case a user needs to remove it.