Monday, October 03, 2005

Monad on Windows 2000

I was chatting to a fellow MVP last week about Monad (actually I chatted with a lot of MVPs about Monad, but that's another story), and he wanted to be able to run Monad on Windows 2000. His problem was that the installation did not seem to work.

The first suggestion include foot-printing the install on a supported OS, than manually installing on Win2k. This can be somewhat time-consuming unless you have the right tools. An alternative is to use the WIX tool kit, specifically dark.exe, to work out what is being installed where. Dark.exe creates an XML file that shows all the files, reg keys, etc generated by installing Monad.

But at the end of the day, this is probably a fairly pointless exercise as Windows 2000 does not have the necessary API support to enable Monad to run properly. One specific example is Monad's use of the Attachment Execution Services (added in XP SP2 and later), which Monad uses to work out where a script came, so that the signing policy can be properly enforced.

The Monad product team suggest that while parts of Monad would run, some parts are likely to either crash or not work at all. So if you want Monad (and what admin doesn't??), you'll have to move on to XP SP2 or later.

[Written on the aeroplane, sent via email]

2 comments:

Unknown said...

After some reasonable research and writing some scripts in PowerShell to capture aspects of our application for the purpose of revision control, deployment, and auditing, I went to improve performance by running the scripts on our production servers; too bad I didn't read the fine print that PowerShell doesn't run on Windows 2000.

That said, is there any way to salvage a sub-set of the assemblies / classes of PowerShell so that I don't have to home grow my own .NET connectors to WMI and ADSI?

It would have been nice if PowerShell would gracefully degrade on "down-level" systems; however, since it is part of code access security, I can see how one might not want to open that can of worms.

Sigh.

Thomas Trias

Thomas Lee said...

Thomas,

The answer is no - see my later post at: http://tfl09.blogspot.com/2008/07/no-virginia-powershell-on-windows-2000.html