REM State

A fairly high priority before getting further into installations on a fresh box is getting the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools installed. This package includes some rather interesting and useful command-line tools — a few of which (sleep, tail, …) should probably be installed with the OS by default. Doing a silent install of rktools.exe is fairly straightforward; it’s a self-extractor that wraps an MSI file and some CAB files. Instead of fiddling with the /C:<command> option to set the install directory on rktools.exe, I opted to unpack the whole thing and work directly with the MSI:


C:\Temp\rktools\>rktools.exe /T:C:\Temp\rktools /C


Once the files are extracted, installation is simply a matter of running msiexec — the only tricky part is specifying a custom install directory. This MSI uses a non-standard parameter for the job (shame on the packagers for not using INSTALLDIR!), but once you know the magic word, it’s easy.


C:\Temp\rktools\>msiexec /qn /i rktools.msi RKTOOLS=”D:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kit\Tools”


And that’s that. Once the resource kit is installed, we can work on much more interesting packages — thanks in part to the Iniman.exe tool which allows us to easily manipulate INI files from batch scripts. However, the next concern will be getting a nice archiver installed that has both a GUI and command-line interface available — we’ll be tackling this on Friday.