Rollback of MSI can occur on Windows even if the service is already installed about push-jobs-cookbook

[smurawski]

I'm sorry you are hitting this. Unfortunately, this is a challenge with MSI's in general. When the install fails and it attempts to roll back, it'll try to undo all the features that were configured. This can lead to a service being uninstalled.

[DavidR91]

@smurawski I totally understand the lack of desire to change the MSI, as it is ridiculously difficult to get them to rollback properly.

Is there any way a compromise can be made instead? For example - to provide optional recipes out-of-the-box which store state data on nodes for whether the client is already installed? Or to provide a wrapper which does an is_installed-esque check before running? (and to totally avoid executing the job if the client is already installed)

I know such a thing is not considered great practice, but this problem is actually very common in our environment (~20 nodes, mixture of Win Server 2012 + Server 2016, some in Azure and some on-prem).

I'm reasonably sure that MSI misbehaviour (when running it on a machine where it is already present) is also the main cause behind our unexplained service stoppages

We're constantly being hit by machines being unavailable for push, and in almost all cases, it's because either the service has been uninstalled during rollback, or it has been automatically stopped (without error)