update flashplayer on a labfull of macs?

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update flashplayer on a labfull of macs?

In my volunteer job, I have a lab of 23 iMacs in a Catholic elementary school. Today they all stopped running some of the software that they use because flashplayer was out of date. So, from my day job, I mounted the flashplayer dmg, fired up my VPN, launched an ARD install panel against one of the machines, and tried to drag the flash installer into it. No go -- couldn't even get it to drag in to the window. So then I went and logged into each machine individually, launched safari, went to get.adobe.com/flashplayer, clicked on the download, went to the downloads directory, double-clicked on the installer, acknowledged that I knew I had downloaded this from the internet, put in the admin password, went to the next machine and repeated all that, then went back to the first machine and clicked "finish", dismounted the installer, quit safari, logged out, then back to the next machine...

lather...rinse...repeat

...23 times...

So this was, to say the least, tedious. Does anybody know of a way to get the flash installer to behave like a real installer so that I can push it out over ARD? Or run from the command line so that I can execute it over ARD?

Anybody want to join in creating a highly creative stream of curses to **** adobe engineers to ****?

[editted to add that with apple censoring swear words we can't REALLY have any fun cursing the adobe engineers. *sigh* ]

Posted on Feb 11, 2013 12:53 PM

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Answer 1

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chicster

Level 2

204 points

Feb 11, 2013 1:17 PM in response to cathy fasano

Ditto the thoughts about adobe. But, here is what you can do for the future -

Go to the adobe page, click on downloads, click on flash player and click on the "IT/OEM distribute" link (or something like that) and follow on to apply to be a distributor.

should end up here:

http://www.adobe.com/products/players/flash-player-distribution.html

I had an answer in a few minutes and that gives you a link to a place where you can download the full installer rather than the program that just goes and gets it.

When you have that, open the dmg file and it should show the red installer icon. Right click or control click that and select show package contents and then migrate to contents/resources and you should see the actual mac package. Drag that out to somewhere else (eg desktop) and that should be something you can install with ARD.

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