Has anyone deployed flash with the new auto updater?

[nicholab]

An Update for the Flash Player Updater « Adobe Secure Software Engineering Team (ASSET) Blog

[Arthur]

I have created two MSTs that disable the standard and automatic updaters for the latest 32-bit and 64-bit Flash Player MSIs for IE. What these do is copy the included mms.cfg to the appropriate folders (%SystemRoot%\System32\Macromed\Flash and/or %SystemRoot%\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash) during installation and remove them when Flash Player is uninstalled.

 

http://i.imgur.com/3AMMz.png

Adobe Flash Player MSTs (v11.2).7z

Edited April 1, 2012 by Arthur
Clarification

[SYNACK]

Interesting, settings on p27 http://wwwimages.adobe.com/www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/flashplayer/pdfs/flash_player_11_2_admin_guide.pdf

 

Now all they need is a local central update point so any updates can be downloaded once rather than opening an autoinstall chanel from them with no oversite and trusting their well known 'security' to not abuse it.

[Arthur]

Interesting, settings on p27

Thanks for the link to the PDF. The sections which talk about silent background updates contradict themselves however...

 

Page 17. Background update is disabled by default. To enable it, edit the mms.cfg file, as shown below:

 

AutoUpdateDisable=1 
SilentAutoUpdateEnable=[color="#FF0000"][b]0[/b][/color]

 

Page 28. The default value is 0 to disable background updates.

 

Surely the mms.cfg should look like this?

 

AutoUpdateDisable=1 
SilentAutoUpdateEnable=1

[SYNACK]

Surely the mms.cfg should look like this?

 

AutoUpdateDisable=1 
SilentAutoUpdateEnable=1

 

Maybe even

 

AutoUpdateDisable=0 
SilentAutoUpdateEnable=1

 

I guess trying and seeing will be the best test, typical Adobe even gets their own documentation wrong

[Arthur]

Your mms.cfg would enable both the regular updater (the annoying one which notifies you every time there is an update) and the silent background updater that runs as a service. I think the opposite would probably be the safest.

 

AutoUpdateDisable

AutoUpdateDisable = [ 0, 1 ] (0 = false, 1 = true)

 

If this value is set to 0 (the default), Flash Player lets a user with admin rights enable or disable notification updates for all accounts on the machine in the Settings Manager.

 

Standard users, meaning users without admin rights, cannot change this setting for all accounts on the machine. Standard users can enable or disable notification update for their individual account. That is, you cannot use AutoUpdateDisable = 0 to prevent the user from disabling notification updates for their individual account.

 

If this value is set to 1, Flash Player disables notification updates.

 

Note: If this value is set to 1, or if the user disables notification updates, the AutoUpdateInterval, DisableProductDownload, and ProductDisabled options in this section are ignored. However, you can still use the SilentAutoUpdateEnable and SilentAutoUpdateVerboseLogging options because a standard user cannot disable background updates.

 

SilentAutoUpdateEnable

SilentAutoUpdateEnable = [ 0, 1 ] (0 = false, 1 = true)

 

Enables a Flash Player update to install silently in the background with no user interaction. Installs both the ActiveX and plug-in players when appropriate. This type of update is called a Flash Player background update.

 

Standard users cannot disable background updates if they are enabled by an administrator.

[Arthur]

typical Adobe even gets their own documentation wrong

Perhaps Adobe would be better off making their settings less confusing? i.e.

 

AutoUpdate=0 
SilentAutoUpdate=0

 

Where 0 = disable, and 1 = enable. Not exactly difficult is it?

[SYNACK]

Perhaps Adobe would be better off making their settings less confusing? i.e.

 

AutoUpdate=0 
SilentAutoUpdate=0

 

Where 0 = disable, and 1 = enable. Not exactly difficult is it?

 

Agreed.

 

I wonder what the traffic pattern is, if its not SSL you could probably create a local mirror with some split DNS trickery. Will have to have a look if I get some spare time with it and network moniter later.

[SimpleSi]

I really hope this isn't an April Fool because its what I've been wanting for a long long time!

 

Si

[Rammie]

Sounds like good news and bad news. I read some stuff on the Adobe Fora (Forums?) conceding that the new autoupdate wasn't working properly for corporate users yet. They said that proxy handling either wasn't working properly or wasn't present at all. Obviously, that is going to stunt our ideas for a while. Secondly, there is some ambiguity over when and whether the autoupdate will actually occur transparently. There is an indication that "major" updates may still require intervention by the user - which raises the question of what intervention is possible by a limited-rights user. The whole thing still suggests to me that Adobe really don't have much idea about corporate/academic sites. The one light of reason was (yet another) suggestion that they're planning a WSUS-like distribution server. On the bright side, it worked really well at home!

[Rammie]

If anyone is interested, I'm some way along with the distribution server plan. The details are in the Adobe "Flash Player Administration Guide" for version 11.2 (Background updates from an internal server). You need to furnish a webserver with both standard (80) and SSL (443) services. You set this up to masquerade as the Adobe download source and then point all your Flash Player autoupdaters to your server using the mms.cfg file. Then, you need to script a check-and-download from the Adobe source files, so you can maintain the files on your internal web source. I've got the second part working well and it also downloads the MSI files for convenience. Currently, I'm still trying to configure the internal SSL service properly (my certificate is out of date, which may explain why the autoupdater is playing hard-to-get). When it all fits together, I should have totally hands-free Flash updates that actually work (yeh, right...)

[timzim]

Fora (Forums?)

 

Both are correct, although 'forums' probably sounds better and would offend far fewer Italians.

[Edu-IT]

I have created two MSTs that disable the standard and automatic updaters for the latest 32-bit and 64-bit Flash Player MSIs for IE. What these do is copy the included mms.cfg to the appropriate folders (%SystemRoot%\System32\Macromed\Flash and/or %SystemRoot%\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash) during installation and remove them when Flash Player is uninstalled.

 

http://i.imgur.com/3AMMz.png

Will this work for any version of Flash, I assume those mms.cfg files don't change?

 

That also complains when I try to unzip with 7zip. Can you supply again @Arthur?

Edited November 7, 2012 by Edu-IT

[Arthur]

Will this work for any version of Flash, I assume those mms.cfg files don't change?

The mms.cfg doesn't change, but the Flash MSI might. I'll test it with the latest version (v11.5.502.110).

 

That also complains when I try to unzip with 7zip.

Do you have 7-zip v9.20 (or newer) installed? Anything older than v9.04 won't be able to open that attachment due to the compression method I used (LZMA2).