VNC Central - How To Deploy

NOTE: VNC Central v0.020 setup now can can be installed in unattended mode requiring no user input and you can also choose which components to install. Find out more about the new setup in this new tutorial.

Since VNC Central v0.018 the application setup has been changed, to allow a simple deployment of the application. This regards only VNC Central setup, not VNC Central+UltraVNC setup since that one has already its own settings inside.

This is a guide on how to exploit the full potential of the vnc central setup: this implies that you want to install VNC Central.

However, if you want to do something that just runs once I suggest you to do all the steps of this guide to create a work directory and configure VNC Central to use the applications of that directory, copy the MFC71.dll file from your windows\system32 directory in the work dir and then make a self extracting archive of the work directory that after the extraction launches vnc central.exe.

During the install, the VNC Central setup checks for the presence of 2 files in the setup directory:

"VNC Central.xml": the VNC Central configuration file that is copied in the directory where VNC Central will be installed
"Deploy.exe": an executable that will be copied into the application and executed at the end of the installation

Let's see how to realize a package for deployment profiting of those 2 features.

0. Prerequisites

First of all you need the WinRAR utility, or if you know any other utility that realizes silent self-extracting executable it will work fine. You must know which applications you want to include in your deployment package and their command-line parameters. Also you must already have installed vnc central on the pc where you will make the deploy package, because the vnc central setup installs important libraries that are needed for the good vnc central functioning.

1. Creating a work directory

Create an empty directory, where all the important files will be stored.

Copy the "VNC Central.exe" executable and the "VNC Central Settings.dll" files from the directory where you installed vnc central to your work directory.

Then create a subdirectory named "My applications" and copy all the files of the applications you need in that subdirectory

2. Configuring VNC Central with relative paths

Then, start VNC Central, configure it like you want and when you're going to add the actions, instead of using the full path of the executables (the one stored in the "My applications" directory, use instead a relative path ( "My Applications \VncViewer.exe")

3. Create the deploy.exe file

Right click the subdirectory of the work directory that contains, and select "Add to an archive".

When the winrar archive properties dialog will open chose "Deploy.exe" as the archive name and then select the "Self Extracting Archive" option.

Click on the Advanced tab, and then on "SFX Options" button.

Inside the "Advanced SFX Options" window click on the "Modes" tab and inside the silent mode box, select "Hide Everything" then press OK.

Press OK again and wait for winrar to complete the operation. The deploy.exe that winrar will have created your work directory will now contain all of your applications.

4. Getting all the necessary files

After you have created the deploy.exe file copy the following files to a new folder and copy inside it the following files:

VNC Central (without ultravnc) setup (the one that you used to install VNC Central)
VNC Central.xml
Deploy.exe

That folder now contains a deployable vnc central, when you will run the setup it will automatically copy "vnc central.xml" and deploy.exe (that will be executed after the install completes). If you want to get a single file out of it you can do a sfx.