Blog SOLIDWORKS Admin Image Deployment – Why won’t my installation start?
There are a number of ways to deploy SOLIDWORKS Admin Images. In this blog, I would like to discuss the deployment "push" option from the options editor. We run into a lot of situations where the image is pushed out, whether on a schedule or for immediate install and nothing happens for the client. The reason for this can be understood first by understanding the process SOLIDWORKS uses to run the installation from the client.
In the options editor under the deployment tab, we have an option for Client Credentials. Most people think that this will be the user that the install runs under. This is not the case. The client installation actually gets install using the Windows task scheduler. A task will be created on the client machine. That task will then launch to run the actual installation. – The client credentials is for connecting to the client machine and creating the task.
After deploying…nothing is installing on the client..let's take a look further on the client side.
Since the first step in the process is to create a Windows task, we can open up the task scheduler to look closer. Below we see the "Install SOLIDWORKS 2014" Task in the scheduler. Looking at the history of the task, we can see a failure.
Looking close, we see it failed to launch the "StartSWInstall.exe"
O.K so we know there is a problem but why? The task scheduler is only showing a generic message.
The answer comes down to user rights. The admin account was used to create the task, however the task itself runs under the local system account. There is now way to specify this during the deployment.
So what is happening here is that the local system account "computer account" is trying to access the Admin Image share and cannot because of the share permissions.
There are 2 ways to correct this. The simple way is to add the "Everyone" group to the share permissions. If you do not want to open the permissions that much, you can add the computer account to the permissions also.
Blake Cokinis
Sr. Support Product Specialist