North Star Labs

I spent a few days this week trying various methods of repackaging our concurrent licensed copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3 for deployment. I’m using Puppet to deploy packages to all of the workstations I manage, so I needed to repackage using PackageMaker.app. We’re also using Sassafras KeyServer to enforce the concurrent license, so it’s a bit of an issue deploying with just the command line installer Adobe provides.

Needless to say, Adobe didn’t make this process easy on me at all. While their software is generally buggy, their draconian license checking routines sure do a wonderful job of making sure I can’t copy the software to other machines. Their tech support line even accused me of trying to pirate the software, which I kindly informed them was impossible since we’ve paid for concurrent licenses.

After a few time consuming attempts using find -x / -newer /tmp/control_file.txt and running into licensing errors when deploying my manually created package to other machines, I decided to buy JAMF Software’s Composer. The software quickly paid for itself considering my salary and time I was spending on the problem. It correctly packaged all of Adobe CS3 the first try, and I don’t run into licensing errors when deploying the packages to all of the other machines. I find this method much better than the Adobe Enterprise Deployment document for CS3.

Composer worked well for me.  Give it a shot if you need to deploy crappy apps like Adobe CS3 using Apple Remote Desktop or Puppet and Installer.app packages.