I am not sure how this situation arises, but I discovered that sometimes the windows installer (Puppet based) on Windows gets into a state where it isn’t installed, but thinks it is, which means that the install won’t work, but it generates messages as if it had worked.

Under c:\psft\pt\ps_home8.55.23 is only the jre directory. Running the install again appears to work, but doesn’t do anything.

The solution is to run the uninstall, then the install will work.

To make ansible cope with this, I got the uninstaller to run if the ps_home directory exists, rather than the psadmin.exe executable. This means the cleanup can be run from ansible if the directory is in this state.

So now my uninstall step looks like:

1
2
3
4
5

   - name: Run the uninstaller
     script: "psw/files/scheduleps1.ps1 -script \"{{ install_path }}\\psft-dpk-setup.ps1 -cleanup -silent\" -logfile {{ ansibletmp }}\\install.log "
     args:
       removes: "{{ ps_home }}"
     register: installfiles

instead of

1
2
3
4
5

   - name: Run the uninstaller
     script: "psw/files/scheduleps1.ps1 -script \"{{ install_path }}\\psft-dpk-setup.ps1 -cleanup -silent\" -logfile {{ ansibletmp }}\\install.log "
     args:
       removes: "{{ ps_home }}\appserv\psadmin.exe"
     register: installfiles

Hopefully this will mean my automated build recovers from the issue, even if it doesn’t prevent it altogether.

I will give more detail later on what the above is doing.