Silent Shibboleth Windows Install

[Rod Widdowson]

First up:

> When it’s run with /qn, it hangs and never finishes

Nothing should ever hang so if you put in a JIRA case against that (specifying the command line you use) I'll see if it's possible
to at least put in checks against whatever is tripping you up - which in turn should make for a better experience in debugging this.

> I’d like to silently install Shibboleth as part of a
> deployment script and since the msi installs Jetty and the Shibboleth Daemon Windows Service
> ...
>.  When it’s run with /qn, it hangs and never finishes, so I’m sure I’m just missing at least one, if not more initialization
variables, but I’m
> not sure what those might be. 

Almost certainly.  The GUI collects a whole bunch of environmental variables. And although there shouldn't be any linkage there may
well be (I do not explicitly test this - see below)

I'm actually somewhat loth to crack this open and make any statement about what is a supportable way of doing headless installs
since I treat the passing of parameters between the GUI phase and the install phase as an internal implementation detail, and I’d
like to keep it that way.  

If there is a groundswell of demand I am prepared to back off from that position and document a limited number of properties, but
for now it will need to be a "No guarantee that this may not break in future", so you'll need to retest on every version - although
you can be pretty confident that patch version (3.x.y.Z) will not break anything.

>I’ve looked into the msi with Orca and I’m not sure what
> may be relevant.

If you are willing to go to the length of looking at the ORCA then you may also get some value from reading the sources

http://svn.shibboleth.net/view/java-identity-provider/tags/3.2.1/idp-installer/src/main/wix/

particularly Shibboleth-IdP-main.wxs

However I suspect that you will do better with logging if you "turn it up to 11" (msiexec /lv* log.log foo.msi), and then, when it
hangs, look at the log.  

If you look at the log while the install is hanging you'll get what you want rather than be drowned in the roll-back messages.

> I’ve also tried setting the following just to see if I could get something to work:
> 
> TARGETDIR
> AD_DOMAIN
> AD_USER
> AD_PASS

You shouldn't need any of these since they _should_ default correctly.  In addition CONFIGURE_AD=FALSE and  AD_USE_GC=FALSE are
wrong (the way that the whacky world of installers goes it's "Anything which is defined is true") and DNSNAME should be inherited
from "ComputerName" - which may nor may not be correct.

However I'd suggest that you do try with (just)

INSTALL_JETTY=yes IDP_SCOPE=csutab.edu DEBUG_INSTALL=yes

The last might provide some even better clues - not least you will get visibility as to whether any of the VBScript is hanging
(which is often the problem in cases like this).

But as I said at the top, nothing should hang (bearing in mind that the actual configuration is a very slow process) so get a JIRA
case entered so I don't lose track of it.

Thanks

Rod