This is a follow up post to this one where I mention that a certain individual felt in was okay not to be diligent and as a result uninstalled the production servers.
One week after finishing up the staging area installation we were scheduled to install into production. In an attempt to decrease the work required on the actual installation date, the now infamous Mr. Uninstaller prepared the environment my taking half of the servers out of the production pool a couple of days early and installing the new version of our software on these servers. Not such a bad idea.
On install day we take all the remaining servers out of production and Mr. Uninstaller proceeds to install the new software on those machines. Everything is going just rosy so we started validating communications between servers and whaddya know, we get a bizarre error citing incorrect version number on an assembly from our project. After a few minutes of stunned amazement (I’d never seen this error before) Mr. Uninstall and I Remote Desktop’d into the server and I started checking the files that get installed. First one that I checked shows that it has the version number associated with the previous release of the software. Mr. Uninstall pipes up with “That file looks like it didn’t get removed properly by your uninstall process”. Of this I’m a little wary as I’ve uninstalled this package hundreds of times in testing and not once did we see this behaviour. A little more investigation shows that all the files are from the previous release, so I go to the event log and sure enough there is an MSI Installer entry that states the installation failed. I look a little harder and sure enough there is no uninstall entry in the event log.
Yes folks, Mr. Uninstall’s successful preliminary installation was less than successful. Heck, he didn’t even uninstall the previous version. Thank god this is the last installation that we have to do for quite some time.
I’m the Igloo Coder and I’d just like to state that one-click uninstalls are not idiot proof.