Can't install Apple Remote Desktop 3.5.1 custom installer on Lion 10.7.3

Question

Can't install Apple Remote Desktop 3.5.1 custom installer on Lion 10.7.3

Ever since Lion 10.7.3 was released, I've not been able to install the custom client installer package that I've made with Apple Remote Desktop 3.5.1.

The error I get is "Remote Desktop Client Update can't be installed on this disk. A newer version of this package is already installed".

I'm guessing this is to do with Apple releasing the ARD 3.5.2 client, but not releasing a new server.

Is there any way of me tweaking the custom installer, so this can be installed? Or do I have have to wait for ARD server to be upgraded to 3.5.2? :-|

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3)

Posted on Feb 16, 2012 9:47 AM

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Answer 1

Mar 8, 2012 4:14 AM in response to MetaswitchNetworks

I was able to download the ARD 3.5.2 Client and take the customisations from the generated custom client installer.

To do this you need to expand the Custom Installer to a directory somewhere (in this example I'll expand it to a directory on the desktop)

pkgutil --expand CustomClientInstaller.pkg ~/Desktop/CustomClientInstaller

Inside the expanded package, there are 3 files which are appended with "_entries" which seem to contain the customisations that are specified during the package generation process. So, we need to copy these to a temporary location...

cp ~/Desktop/CustomClientInstaller/RemoteDesktopClient.pkg/Scripts/Tools/*_entries ~/Desktop

Now, what we need to do is expand the ARD Client we just downloaded (3.5.2) and apply the customisations to it...

pkgutil --expand RemoteDesktopClient.pkg ~/Desktop/RemoteDesktopClient

cp ~/Desktop/*_entries ~/Desktop/RemoteDesktopClient/RemoteDesktopClient.pkg/Scripts/Tools

pkgutil --flatten ~/Desktop/RemoteDesktopClient CustomRemoteDesktopClient.pkg

You should now have an up-to-date customised ARD client. Note that I have not fully tested all of the options, such as creating users. It may be necessary to look at this post if the newly customised ARD client has problems creating a new user.

Hope that helps

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Answer 2

Mar 18, 2012 11:08 AM in response to MetaswitchNetworks

Not sure why it fails to save the .pkg file to the selected destination, but I found temp file is actually stored here:

/private/tmp/RemoteDesktopClientInstaller

You can grab it and it works just fine.

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Answer 3

tgbauer

Level 1

9 points

Apr 15, 2012 12:19 AM in response to MetaswitchNetworks

If you have ssh access to the system, you can use the generic client install package, install it via ssh as discribed in the ARD Admin Guide ( http://images.apple.com/remotedesktop/pdf/ARD_Admin_Guide.pdf ), then use the information on the following page to configure the client via ssh.

http://penguinpackets.com/~kelly/kblog/blog/01254755514

Basically comes down to something like the following command:

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/k ickstart -activate -configure -access -on -restart -agent -privs -all -users <ShortName>

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