Summary

In the past couple weeks after your server upgrades, you’ve managed to get a few people upgraded to Lotus Notes R8.5 Fix Pack 1 manually (mostly the “top-brass” to speed up adoption of Lotus Notes R8.5 FP1 in the company). Word is spreading around about the awesomeness of Lotus Notes R8.5 and people want to have it installed without waiting for the training sessions to be ready. So, what do you do (especially when you can’t say “no” because it’s the VP of HR asking to be upgraded)?

Do you go desk-by-desk and upgrade employees manually? Or do you finally decide to sit down and make SmartUpgrade work in your company?

If you are like me, you decided to sit down and (at least try to) make SmartUpgrade work.

However, chances are that your company is like the one that I work for and has many “remote” employees who don’t have access to a file server AND who also happen to be configured as “Users” or “Power Users” on their desktop/laptops. Because of that, you can’t tell them to simply access a network drive and double-click on the setup.exe of the R8.5 install package. And even if they could: they wouldn’t be able to upgrade because of their limited rights. So, what do you do in this case?

Well, you use SURunAsWizard.exe to create a self-contained executable that logs into the machine with a user id that has Administrator rights to the machine and does the upgrade for you. Sounds cool isn’t it? Too bad it’s broken in R8.5 Fix Pack 1.

The Problem with SURunAsWizard.exe in R8.5 Fix Pack 1

Ahhhh SURunAsWizard.exe … one of the much touted “features” in R7.0.2 and up (if I remember correctly but I can’t remember what I did last week so don’t quote me on this ok?). Oh what a joy it promises to be. The “end-all/solve all” solution: with a few clicks you can package the install files in a (quite large) executable file so that they run under an administrator account, attach it to your SmartUpgrade “kit” document and, via policies and/or groups, let SmartUpgrade run magically to upgrade your users.

Unfortunately for me, I had a really tough time (a root canal procedure would have been easier … I think) to get SURunAsWizard.exe to work right. In fact, it’s only after opening a PMR with Lotus Support and diligently working with 2 support reps that we discovered that there is a bug with the SURunAsWizard tool in R8.5 Fix Pack 1 when you try to package all the files in 1 single (and large) executable. SURunAsWizard.exe works perfectly fine in R8.5 FP1 IF you tell it to “Store a Reference to a file on a network share” … but not with the “Store files into the SURunAs executable, creating a self-contained package” option.

What is the exact problem? Well, if you put that large executable that SURunAsWizard created on one of your coworkers computer with limited rights and double-click on it … you’ll get a nice messagebox that says “Failed to launch process as specified user” on the 1st line and “Error 123: The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect” on the 2nd line.

SURunAsWizard in R8.5 ... The Error when you use a single exe package

If you’re curious like me, you’ll do a Google search on the error and you’ll end up with technote #1247849. That technote mentions that error (scroll to the bottom) but it only says “This is not a Lotus Notes error, but an error from the Wizard indicating that either there is a problem with the local user account on the OS, or the user information was entered incorrectly in the wizard.” … and it also says “In Windows XP, you can verify the user information entered in the wizard by pathing out to the MSI location, right-click on the MSI, choose RunAs. If there is no problem with the user account and if the user information was entered in the wizard correctly, there will be no error. Creating a new user account on the OS should resolve this error.”. In this case, it’s a lie: the problem is with the SURunAsWizard tool.

But anyway,  for the fun of it, you re-create the package just in case you made a typo in the user name and password … several times. You even try different switches to pass to the setup.exe when you are creating the package. Alas, nothing works. You then follow what the technote says and re-create another account on the OS (and your package again so that it uses the new user id and password) just to see if it helps but it dosen’t resolve it.

Now, if you look on the hard drive, in my particular case at the root of the C: drive, you’ll find the log file that the SURunAsWizard generates when it tries to run.

The Log File created by the package of the SURunAsWizard

When you open that log file, you’ll see a nice error that says that it can’t detach files to a strange path … notice how it tries to re-create a “C:\Temp” folder structure? That’s really odd.

Starting SURunAs logging
Created temporary subdirectory: C:\DOCUME~1\mchampoux\LOCALS~1\Temp\SURunas1392\C:\Temp\85Final
***> Failed to detach resource file to C:\DOCUME~1\mchampoux\LOCALS~1\Temp\SURunas1392\C:\Temp\85Final\instmsia.exe
Created temporary subdirectory: C:\DOCUME~1\mchampoux\LOCALS~1\Temp\SURunas1392\C:\Temp\85Final
***> Failed to detach resource file to C:\DOCUME~1\mchampoux\LOCALS~1\Temp\SURunas1392\C:\Temp\85Final\instmsiw.exe
Created temporary subdirectory: C:\DOCUME~1\mchampoux\LOCALS~1\Temp\SURunas1392\C:\Temp\85Final
***> Failed to detach resource file to C:\DOCUME~1\mchampoux\LOCALS~1\Temp\SURunas1392\C:\Temp\85Final\setup.exe
[... there's a ton more entries ...]
Setting current directory to C:\DOCUME~1\mchampoux\LOCALS~1\Temp\SURunas1392\
COMMAND: C:\DOCUME~1\mchampoux\LOCALS~1\Temp\SURunas1392\C:\Temp\85Final\setup.exe setup -d -a /s /w /v”ALLUSERS=1 /qb+”
USERNAME: adminid
DOMAIN: HP6120
***> Failed to launch process as specified user.
Error 123: The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.
Stopping SURunAs logging

So … logically speaking, it’s normal that it fails miserably … that’s not a valid path in Windows because it’s illegal to create a folder with a “:” in it.

Ok, this was a long post … so get on with it: what’s the solution???

The Solution

Simple: if you absolutely must create a self-contained package for your R8.5 deployment, simply use the SURunAsWizard from your R7.0.2 (or higher) installation. I’m serious.

This problem was SPRed by Lotus Support as SPR #ALAS7WES7X.

Enjoy!