I would like to share with you the following story...



Monday morning, I try to log in to my PC. But I can't. Instead, it says 
"Installing managed software Silverlight..."

I've seen this kind of thing before. It happens when the guys at HQ use 
a GPO to remotely install software. I know we've got some Microsoft 
training coming up, and I'm guessing it requires Silverlight, so that's 
probably what this is all about. Hopefully if I just wait a minute, 
it'll finish installing and let me use my PC.

Obviously I didn't time exactly, but it took /at least/ 40 minutes to 
get to the login prompt. Ouch!

During this time, I have several people come to me to ask questions such as
- What the heck is Silverlight? I've never heard of it.
- Do we need it?
- Is it supposed to be doing this?
- Is it a virus?
- How long will it take?
- Andrew, my PC is broken, it won't let me log in. I keep having to 
unplug it to get it to work.
- etc.

Eventually the PC lets me log in, and I see an email from 9PM on Friday 
warning us all that "a small piece of software" will be installed to 
allow the training to proceed. Yeah, thanks for telling us after close 
of business. :-P (This will be a timezone issue. 9PM UK time is only 4PM 
or so in the USA.)

Judging from the activity pattern of the PC, it looks like it spent 35 
minutes just downloading the installer, and only 5 minutes actually 
installing it. Presumably for the guys in the USA, the download only 
takes a few seconds (since it happens at LAN speed not WAN speed). So 
it's 9AM and everybody has turned on their PC, and they're all trying to 
download the same installer package over an encrypted WAN link at the 
same time. Presumably that's why it's taking so long.

I sent an email to the guy who set up the GPO suggesting that in future 
it would make much more sense to put a copy of the installer on our 
local file server and deploy it from there. He agrees with me.



I thought no more of it, until a guy from another site started 
complaining that the installer kept getting "hung". I offered that I had 
to wait 40 minutes, at which point he was dumbstruck. He said that they 
couldn't possibly wait that long, and he would do the install manually.

At this point, they redo the GPO so that it installs from each site's 
local file server. The guy said he thought that "such a small installer" 
wouldn't be a problem. But it turns out it's a 240MB MSI file. (Hence 
the "fail" image I got yesterday.) The other IT guys thought it was 
pretty amusing, apparently.

So I notice that my file server now has a 240MB MSI file on it. And my 
PC is installing Silverlight /again/. This time it only takes about 5 
minutes instead of 40.



I thought no more of it, until a user complained to me that they 
couldn't "install" Silverlight. They said part of the training wasn't 
showing up because Silverlight wasn't installed, "and when I navigate to 
it from the Start menu, it says I don't have permission to install it".

At this point, I start investigating. My PC appeared to install the 
managed software without issue, and yet Silverlight doesn't show up in 
Add/Remove Programs. Sometimes browser plugins don't though. Then I look 
at the start menu. There /is/ a Silverlight folder with a Silverlight 
item in it, but the icon is the default program icon. I click it, and lo 
and behold, the Microsoft Silverlight installer runs. When it finishes 
running, Silverlight now appears in Add/Remove Programs.

OK, WTF is going on here?

I take the 240MB Silverlight.msi file and run it in a VM. All it 
actually does is create a folder under Program Files and unpack 365MB of 
data into it. Leafing through the contents, I find Process Explorer, the 
Internet Explorer 4 installer package (a bazillion *.cab files totalling 
about 300MB), something called Visual SourceSafe, the server executable 
for our project management system, several half-edited procedure 
documents, an Access database of laptop loans... and Silverlight.exe, 
which is a 6MB file that installs Silverlight.

...

You realise what's happened here, right? Somebody has downloaded the 
Silverlight installer, but instead of putting that into an MSI, they've 
somehow put /the entire folder/ on their harddrive into the MSI. All 
365MB of it. Everything that happened to be in that folder. That is the 
first fail.

The second fail is that they somehow failed to notice that the MSI file 
has become 40x bigger than the actual installer binary.

The third fail is that the MSI package unpacks all this stuff and 
creates a link to the installer binary, instead of actually /running/ 
it. (Possibly somebody thought this was the actual program, not the 
/installer/ for the program.)

And the fourth fail is that nobody tried actually /running/ this MSI 
package to check that it works. Or if they did, they ran it, saw that 
"Silverlight" appeared on the Start menu, and thought that means it worked.

And /that/ is today's quadruple IT fail. Thank you.

I have of course documented all of this in meticulous detail. It'll be 
interesting to see what kind of reply I get when America wakes up today...

Gees, no wonder it took 40 minutes for this crap to install the first 
time! o_O

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