We’re trying to package the following software: Netburner Virtual Comm Port 2.1

Source location: https://www.netburner.com/support/doc-s-and-downloads/sb800-ex/deployment-tools-25

If run in mode 'win32' (attended installation) the software installs fine except for the fact that the vsbsetup.exe has an expired certificate.

Prepopulating that certificate in the ‘Trusted Publishers’ store for the local machines suppresses the ominous warnings during the install, but this is of course not a recommended way of working in a production environment and should be fixed by Netburner as soon as possible.

When deploying this application for enterprise use we need to be able to do an unattended silent setup… This is when the real misery starts…

The installer package uses a Bitrock InstallBuilder package framework. Parameters can be passed to the setup file as explained by the ‘VirtualCommPort-2.1.exe --help’ command.

A pretty straight-forward packaging job, right?

The attended setup has 2 dialog windows with choices:

- Installation folder

  Our company policy prohibits us from installing directly on the root drive, so we wish to change this to another location than the default proposed ‘C:\nburn’

- Operating system

  Weird that the setup does not know which operating system it is running on, but okay… Let’s roll with it.

Running the below command seems to be what we want:

VirtualCommPort-2.1.exe --unattendedmodeui none --mode unattended --installer-language en --prefix "C:\Program Files (x86)\VirtualCommPort-2.1" --os nt6x64

Warning: case-sensitive parameters!!

The result is that the alternative installation directory is completely ignored and the installation happens anyway in the default C:\nburn folder.

But even worse, the installation only succeeds in half of its actions as can be read in the log file created in the %temp% folder.

By reading the Bitrock InstallBuilder user guide, I believe this is just a poor packaging job by NetBurner as unattended mode installs are possible with the framework.

The only way we could make this work is:

1) Prepopulate the expired certificate in the Trusted Publishers store for the local machine

2) Copy the C:\nburn folder manually (captured from a manual install) before starting the setup

3) Run the unattended setup by executing command:

VirtualCommPort-2.1.exe --unattendedmodeui none --mode unattended

Then the setup runs silently but still installs to the C:\nburn folder instead of our preferred location.

Hope they fix this in a future release...