Aka “It is recommended that you use an account that is a local administrator and run the JSS Installer with elevated permissions”
Hey all. This is another thing that I occasionally come across as an eternal consultant and keep forgetting the exact command needed to work around it, so externally accessible blog it is!
Background
So, what am I talking about? Well, if you try to run a JSS installer on Windows with the wrong user you get this error message:
The JSS installer (downloaded from the “My Assets” section of Jamf Nation) needs to be run by the full local administrator account, rather than a domain administrator or a network user given local administrator privileges. If you fail to use this specific account, you get the above error.
As you can imagine, it’s not always good practice to give out these account details especially for external staff. However, as long as you are an administrative user on the Windows server, we have a way around it.
Lets do this!
Here we go:
1) Click the Windows / Start button and enter ‘cmd’.
2) Right-click on the ‘cmd’ program and click “Run as administrator”.
3) If the UAC protection appears, confirm this is in response to you trying to launch ‘cmd’ as an administrator, and click “Yes”.
4) This should launch the ‘cmd’ program with administrative rights.
5) Enter the below command and hit the ‘return’ key. Adjust the path to the location of your JSS Installer.msi.
Don’t forget: you can also use tab-complete to speed up enter the path, and as its a Windows OS, it’ll be backslashes (“”) instead of standard slashes (“/”).
msiexec /i "C:\Path\To\JSS Installer.msi"
6) This should then launch the JSS Installer with the correct permissions to complete.
7) One other point to remember is not to close the cmd program until you’ve finished your installation and closed it. If you close the cmd session first, may forcibly close the Installer.
8) Job done, consume beverage of choice as a reward.
Summary
And there we go, we covered how you can launch and run with the Jamf Pro / Casper JSS Installer MSI on Windows with any administrator account. Hopefully that’ll help some of you out (or future me when I forget again)! As always, if you have any questions, queries or comments, let us know below (or @daz_wallace on Mac Admins Slack) and I’ll try to respond to and delve into as many as I can.
P.S. Hope you liked the Server 2012 screenshots this time ; )
The usual Disclaimer:
While the author has taken care to provide our readers with accurate information, please use your discretion before acting upon information based on the blog post. Amsys will not compensate you in any way whatsoever if you ever happen to suffer a loss/inconvenience/damage because of/while making use of information in this blog.