Deploy Java Installation using Domain Group Policy
Hello, everyone and welcome to another one of my IT tutorials today, I'm going to talk about deploying Java through domain policy. This can actually be applied to any software with an MSI package, but with Java it's a bit tricky as there's no MSI available directly. So you have to do a bit of work to get the MSI package. So, let's start by downloading Java, we want to download it directly from Oracle's website. As that's doing, the place and offline package is available from Java comm. There will be an online installer which is not going to work for us easiest way to get to the right place.
You just type in Java, son come and click Java. Se e, then latest version is Java. 7 update, 3 Gerry download. I accept the license and pick the offline package. 64-Bit is only available offline, so you can easily download that if you have a 64-bit systems in your domain download and you hit run ok now it's going to start an installer, but we don't want to install it. Just yet we just leave it open once it starts. Ok now open the application data folder, so you can go to run type in % app data % and go one directory up to the AB data.
Local now, son Java and the latest Java version folder, and here you will find the MSI file. This is the actual MSI file which is used for installing Java. So what we want to do is we just copy this whole folder and we need to put it in a shared location. As for this example, let's just create a temporary shaded location right here on the domain controller, so software-based it in here and let's share it, go to properties sharing, share everyone add, and we want read permissions.
They don't need write, permissions, read, permissions are just fine hit, share the shared hit close and we can test it by typing the address of the computer software and there it is so we want to copy this path and, let's open the group policy management, administrative tools And group policy management in order to deploy installations without user interaction, one policy needs to be defined for all computers and the best place to do it is in a default domain policy. So you click that hit edit and that box is located in computer's policies.
Administrative template windows, components and windows installer, and here we want to find the policy called always install with elevated privileges. So here it is, we want to right click Edit, and we want to enable this. We can close the default domain policy and, if you generate the view of the settings, windows actually shows a warning that this setting must be set for machine and user to be enforced. But we don't want to set this for users only for machines, because the installation occurs at computer boot up, so there's no use lockdown and software is installed. So in this case you only need to define it for the machine now.
Another important thing to remember for software deployment is each software need to be deployed with its own group policy object, at least in my testing experiences, or when I try to point to different software's using the same object. Only one of them would install the other one. Wouldn'T even start installing, so let's create a new GPO and let's call it Java deployment go to edit. And here it's pretty simple. We just go to software settings, software, installation and new package, and now it's important here that you don't navigate to the MSI package on your local system, you need to navigate through a shared location so that any computer on the domain could access it.
That is why we had to put it in a shared folder, so we go to the shared location that we copied or clipboard and there's our MSI file we selected here. We just need a signed. We don't need to do any advanced settings here, ok and there it is it's deployed. We have to remember to link the GPO to the organizational unit. Since this is my testing environment. I really didn't have any organizational units, so I'm just going to link the new GPO R to the root of the domain, so Java deployment link.
Now, after we've finished this, we should run gpupdate just in case always a good practice to run gpupdate after changing any group policy settings and now let's go to the member of our domain and see if the software deploys on the system. That is member of the domain. Let'S double check to make sure that Java is not installed, as you can see, there's actually no programs here. This is a fresh installation. So now what we do is we have to run GP update as well, and we wait and, as you can see, when it updated computer policy, it notice that there is a software installation pending and prompts us for start. So we hit Y and the system is going to restart in less than a minute now, when the system boots, it should install the Java, let's wait and see so, as you can see the please way to stay on the screen for quite a while.
That is because, in the background software installation is taking place and this one that happens the first time, because once the software is installed, it doesn't install again, so users will have to be patient the very first time around, especially if you do playing deploying multiple softwares. Then all of them are going to install at once and we have a user there, which is not an administrator and let's check if the software installed control panel and there it is Java update 3. Thank you very much for watching hope. You learned something have a great day:
