Remotely installing software

Ever need to install software remotely?  Why not just fire up Remote Desktop (or VNC) and connect and install right?  That works great if it's one machine you need to install software on.  What happens when you have a lab full of machines that you need to install software on?  You either need a lot of time or something that works faster than remotely installing it on each machine.  So what are you options?

A login script.  Great!  But you have to make the script, associate with only the machines (or specific user) that you need it on, and then wait for someone to log into the machine.  Or remote the machine and log in yourself, but that doesn't really help us speed up anything since we need to make sure it gets installed.

Group policy.  The old school way to push software requires an MSI.  The programs that I was installing didn't come packaged in an MSI, it was an EXE.  Yes, I know I could repackage it into an MSI, but I want to get this software installed quick and I don't want to spend the time on that.

Third party management software.  Yes, this a really good option.  The problem is that we're still working the bugs out of the management software right now and for an unknown reason it doesn't want to push these installers.  The long term way to push software is going to be to get this fixed.  But right now I'm going to postpone troubleshooting on the management software just so I can quickly get this software installed and get the end users back running.

So what did I finally go with?

PSEXEC.  Psexec is your friend.  It's one of the ps tools available from Microsoft (formerly Sysinternals). It's a free download and it will let you execute commands on remote systems.  So with a quick (and very dirty) batch file I was a able to loop through a list of computer names and install programs that I needed to get installed.

psexec /? will give you all the options, but for my purposes here's what I used:

psexec \\machinename -user someuser -p somepassword C:\installerfilename.exe /switches

And that's it.  Well, actually I used a FOR loop in a batch file to process through all the machine names, but the actual work was done with that command right there.

Here's a link for info on the FOR loop.  http://ss64.com/nt/for2.html   This post is starting to run so I'll save the notes about FOR loops for another post.