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We are planning a Corporate Rollout and we would like to confirm if slient updates will work if user do not have admin rights?

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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We are planning a Corporate Rollout and we would like to confirm if slient updates will work if user do not have admin rights?

We are planning to deploy Firefox to all end users running Windows 7 via SCCM 2007 SP1. That is fine and should not be a problem but the question is how we can keep it maintained after the installation?

More specifically I read the support article for Firefox 12 that said you must have admin rights to install updates. Our end-users do not have admin rights so how can we keep our Firefox updated?

I read another article that said Firefox will be doing silent installs is this currently working? Also can someone verify our assumptions and provide an explanation to how updates work so we can roll out Firefox?

We are planning a Corporate Rollout and we would like to confirm if slient updates will work if user do not have admin rights? We are planning to deploy Firefox to all end users running Windows 7 via SCCM 2007 SP1. That is fine and should not be a problem but the question is how we can keep it maintained after the installation? More specifically I read the support article for Firefox 12 that said you must have admin rights to install updates. Our end-users do not have admin rights so how can we keep our Firefox updated? I read another article that said Firefox will be doing silent installs is this currently working? Also can someone verify our assumptions and provide an explanation to how updates work so we can roll out Firefox?

All Replies (4)

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hello, unfortunately at the moment the silent update service is only capable to circumvent the windows 7 UAC prompts after every update. the possibility for limited user accounts to trigger and run updates through the service is part of the plan but not implemented yet - development of this feature is tracked in bug #711475, but don't expect it to land very soon.

the firefox installer supports a silent installation through the command line argument -ms.

so at the moment you'd have to trigger a silent installation with admin rights after every update to keep the browser up to date (it should be possible to just install a newer version on top of the old one).

also refer to https://wiki.mozilla.org/Deployment:Deploying_Firefox & http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/.../faq/

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Thank you for the reply is there a way we can just download the "updates" and deploy them rather than reinstall the new browser each time an update becomes available?

Modified by emellino

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the following guide explains how to apply updates (they come packaged in a .mar file) manually, again that would need admin rights: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Software_Update:Manually_Installing_...

the directory from where you can obtain the current localized updates is accessible at http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozil.../win32/

or in order to circumvent the problems with the updates you could put the initial installation into a place your users have write-access in, like in %appdata% (would have other consequences of course; a different installation for each user) or make the %programfiles%\Mozilla Firefox - folder writable for users, then the built-in auto-updater should work without intervention.

edit: a in-depth look at the update process with more links: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Software_Update

Modified by philipp

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You need these three files in the updates\0 folder:

  • update.mar (renamed update partial/complete.mar)
  • update.status: pending + linefeed (0x0A) (use this data URI: data:text/plain,pending%0A)
  • update.version: xx.xx.xx (version to update to, e.g. 12.0.1)

Modified by cor-el