Installing RTC 2.0 on a Windows Server 2003 machine

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Installing RTC 2.0 client on the Win2003 machine provided by our customer is proving to be a challenge of patience and futility. I spent the better half of the day trying everything I can think of but:

– Using the bundled launchpad doesnt do anything: everything just quits without any warning or error.
– Invoking the launchpad using the parameters in the autorun.inf file () doesnt work.
– Invoking launchpad\launchpad.bat terminates with a wrong variable expansion.
– Invoking the various installer executable inside the win32 sub-directory produces a “Missing file install.xml” error and then will show the Installation Manager window. Unfortunately it cannot install anything even if the preference shows the repository to the RTC 2.0 extracted files are detected as “connected”.

I know the installer works because we have installed it fine on our WinXP workstations. The md5sum of the file in the Win2003 machine matches the one in our XP workstations.

Ready to give up and log a RTC bug, I did some more fiddling to gather more information and tried to download the web install even if it is going to be painful installing RTC on a slow and erratic connection. I got the same results.

Then I noticed that there were lots of files named install-[something].xml in the win32 directory but no install.xml file. An idea hit me and created a copy of the “install-client.xml” and renamed it to “install.xml”. I then executed the win32\install.exe and everything installed as expected.

And that concludes a whole-day wrangling on getting RTC 2.0 installed in the Win2003 server. Sometimes the best solutions are really those that hide under our noses. 🙁

ciao!