Hey Alex, Thanks for the follow up! I did continue working on this, and got to a point where I'm happy with how it is working. I was in contact with Karl about it too via email, and sent him some details, but for reference for others who find it useful.. We went with the solution of putting the config into separate files, using the 'configSource' option as needed to specify references to external files. Further to that, we created an extension for Otter to allow us to manage the settings in those files - similar to how the 'EnsureAppSetting' thing works, but allowing an XPath expression to be used to identify the precise element in the config file to check. That meant we could use it for e.g. files that hold connection strings. (I do intend to publish that extension to the Den at some point - haven't so far gotten around to it though). Let me know if you would like any more detail on what we're doing! Thanks, Andrew

Hey Tod, Thanks for the answer and apologies for not getting back to you sooner... I see a new version of Otter is now available with the fixes included, so I'll try that out and see what happens. Thanks for the great support! Andrew

That works - awesome - thank you so much!

Thank you for reporting that, we had scheduled to do a maintenance release v1.7.3 today and were able to get a fix in for it - should be available before the end of the day.

Otter wasn't designed as general-purpose task schedule, but the orchestration jobs can certainly accomplish similar purposes. On the agent roadmap, we do have "impersonation" as a feature... which means you could run commands and scripts under different user contexts. I wonder if you could use use Otter to configure the schedule jobs across your servers? We don't have operations to configure scheduled tasks, but certainly you could use PowerShell DSC (or write an operation to do this) to configure scheduled tasks.

There is a Machine Key (which is a hash of your network card and CPUID) and your License Key. Those are sent to Inedo.com (either from the software, or manually at myinedo.com), which then returns an activation code. You can change your license key on Admin > License Key.

Hi, Yep it was the Powershell script in the end!

That was weird. I ended up figuring it out; I had to reinstall the application under the builtin web server and then move it ... Not sure why.

You can leverage the silent installation options for this: http://inedo.com/support/documentation/otter/installation/silent#silent-agent-install

I heard from another user who was experiencing exactly the same issue. The solution they found was to switch otter’s IIS Application Pool to Classic Pipeline (instead of Integrated). Of course it should work in both, but for whatever reason, it didn't here. So maybe it will help you as well!

Otter wouldn't be the right tool to track the why of those changes, but at a minimum, you could use a Git-based raft to track changes. But you'd certainly be better off bundling these changes, and running them through a pipeline that gives you approvals, visibility -- basically all the things you'll want when implementing an ITIL-based workflow. This is where a tool like BuildMaster would come in.

There are some bugs using map variables within OtterScript in v5.5.3; these have since been resolved.

Great! Thanks for the update Ben.

This means that the Otter Service or Inedo Agent doesn't have permissions to write to the host file. Typically this requires Administrative / LOCAL SYSTEM access.

Just as an update to this, we have updated the behavior of how role dependencies work to better support this scenario. Given the original example... B (Collect) D (Collect) B (Configure) D (Configure) The new behavior will be that, if "B" reports drift, then "D" (as a dependent role) will also be considered drifted, and then both B and D will be configured as expected.

I managed to get sql to install by manually creating the database, strangely enough the otter installer wouldent even install sql express, anyways once i got past that it wouldent give me the option to install it on iis even though the prerequisites were met so I installed the build in one but keep getting connection refused any ideas, all firewalls are off, and the otter web server is running which had to be manually started.

There wasn't another role doing remediation. This particular instance was just supposed to be a simple check for a file just for display. I have orchestration plans that run and actually build servers. Other points of interest however: Why does running the configuration job for role Rebuild then return result for all servers, but the recurring job does not? I saw the same results with a more complete role configuration using the OtterScript "Ensure File" that would create the file as needed with remediation.

Sounds good. Thanks for taking a look Ben.

It is, albeit a bit buried in the formal specification.

Hi Leo, can you try this? http://44.inedo.com/otter/artifactory-1.5.0-beta1.zip Note it will need to be manually installed by just copying the otterx file to your extensions folder.