Installation Guide

Silent Installation and Manual Recovery from
Installer Failures
Silent Installations
Installation programs developed with InstallShield platforms have a mechanism for running the
Installer in a silent mode. In a silent installation, interactive dialogs are not displayed. Information
and answers that you would normally provide are read from a response file. Response files can
be identified by having the same name as the Installer executable file, but with an “.iss” extension.
Response files are created by first running the installer in “record mode”. During record mode,
you manually enter information the same way as if the product would be used in normal mode.
To enter record mode, start the setup program from a command prompt and pass in a /r command
line parameter. For example, if the setup program executable is setup.exe, then a response file
setup.iss is created when the Installer is launched using the command setup.exe /r. When
the response file is created, another installation can be performed launching the Installer with
the command: setup.exe /s.
Warning: Silent installations can be dangerous when performed with incorrect response
files, and their use is discouraged. If you choose to use this method, be absolutely certain
that the execution environment is configured identically to the environment where the
response file was created. Slight variations in the configuration can cause unexpected
errors or different installation paths that does not align with the expected response file
structure. These situations could lead to a catastrophic failure of the Installer program,
which, in turn, would require a manual recovery.
Installation Guide Cisco ICM/IPCC Enterprise & Hosted Editions Release 7.2(1)
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Chapter 4