winrei: windows remote installation

What it is

winrei is a gui to update your windows clients by pushing patches (win, ie, office and virtually whatever patch), service packs and any other programs that can install non interactively.

It doesn not require special programs or services installed on clients and (for now) it works with NT4, 2000, XP.
Windows 95/98 systems are definitively NOT supported.

It is multithreaded, that means that you can at the same time install the same program on more than one machine.

And last, but not least, it is free: it is released under the GPL open source licence and you can download and use it for free (you haven't to pay nothing!).

What it is not

winrei it is not a program:

to inventory software installed on your clients (please see AIDA32 for a very good free sw)
to scan clients for vulnerabilities
to list service packs and patches that you have to install
to install more than one patch/service pack at one time

Why winrei?

Microsoft operating systems are highly insecure systems, the demostration is the enormous number of viruses that infect windows machines.

Moreover there are many vulnerabilities that permit a remote control of machines by hackers and some viruses. Famous examples are the Blaster and Sasser worms, see for example this article or this other.

Microsoft releases security patches to apply on systems but you have to install them manually (expecially on NT) or to use commercial products to make automatic installations. This is an important cost for companies (In 2003 I spent 2 days to apply Blaster patch to all my clients, 2 weeks later there was another patch to apply), I think we have spent so much money in microsoft and antivirus products and I don't want to spend more to buy commercial products that automates installations with push tecnologies.

Yes, I know: what about windows update?
I know it, but first of all it works only from win2000 and later (I have still many NT4 clients) and if you have many clients but a not so good internet connection you will have some problems when all of them will try to update from Microsoft's site.

So I started searching on the web some tools that permit me to automate the process of patches (and programs) installation.

I don't like too much solutions like admin users and login scripts that automate updates because you rely on users, you give them an administrator access and you never know what users are able to do ;-(

I think you should always ask yourself about:

am I sure (or have I a mean to check) that the user logged on with the administrator account and terminated well the installation?
what happens if during the installation the user hits CTRL+ALT+DEL and kills the update process? Answer: it is logged on your windows domain with administrative privileges!!!

During my search of a free sw that permit the installation via push tecnology on clients from a server point of view (that is: it is not the client that ask for update but it is a remote machine - perhaps your machine - that push updates) I found the psExec utility by sysinternals: a very useful console program that gives you the possibility of execute remote commands on win32 systems. I used it to update some clients in my lan, it works well but it is a console only program and you have to launch it for each pc you want to update in the network with many parameters. If you have only a few pcs to update it is good, but if you have for example 100 pcs with a mix of different os versions (NT, 2000, XP) the work became hard (patches and service packs are specifics for each operating system).

This is why I decided to code winrei, a gui wrapper (and much more, see features) for the psExec utility.

With winrei you can update pcs in your lan in a simple and fast manner that is completely transparent for users.

Features

you install winrei only on a single pc: you don't need to install anything on your clients
it is completely free (see license for details)
autodetects domains/workgroups and workstations in your lan
multidomain installation at the same time
multithreaded application: you can choose how many machines to update at the same time (by default it uses 4 threads)
you can graphically select the list of machines you want update from each domain/workgroup
you can specify a user/passwd with admin rights per each domain/workgroup or a local user for all machines in a domain/workgroup
it works with NT, 2000 and XP
you haven't to know the installed os of your machines: you can simply specify that a patch, service pack or whatever else has to be installed only on machines that use one or more of the supported os. winrei will skip all the other selected machines.
you can choose if you want to reboot the remote machine after the installation or not (be careful! Patches and service packs will be active only after a reboot!)

Feedback

I coded winrei in a couple of weekends at home using the wonderful python language, the program is still a beta release so use it at your own risk. I've tested winrei at work and I found it reliable but there may still be some little bugs.

I will appreciate very much your feedback about winrei (the program work on your system? Did you find it useful? Would you like to have more features? Did you find a bug?).

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

please see gpl-license for more details.

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psExec utility is freeware but can't be redistributed, so you have to download it before you can use winrei.

Installation

There is no special installation to do, simply download the binary package of winrei, unzip it in a directory (do the same with psexec) and you can start using it. For a minimal help and a screenshot see the help page.

Sources will be availables from the 1.0 stable version but you can write me if you want them before.

Remember that winrei relies on psExec.exe for installations, so you have to download and put it in the same directory.

Simply launch the program winrei.exe, wait some seconds for the lan scanning, and the main frame of winrei will appear.