Adobe Creative Suite at imaging time: Plugins issues... using both AAMMEE and CCPackager.... same!

[kerouak]

So, Creative suite successfully installs at imaging time, however, on indesing startup, It's throwing up plugin errors.

Anyone having same issues?
anyone suggest a fix??

Was working fine before JSS upgrade?

cheers

[jake_snyder]

We had a situation that is somewhat similar. Is this the new Adobe Creative Cloud 2014 update? InDesign wouldn't launch after the latest update. We uninstalled just InDesign, repackaged, and then deployed it to solve this issue.

I don't think it's related to JSS.

[RobertHammen]

What OS is your JSS? Distribution Point? Is the PKG getting ZIPped automagically when you add it to Casper Admin? What version of Casper Suite?

[kerouak]

JSS: Windows SErver 2008 / AFP Distribution point, Copying package straight to the Dist. point so no zipping.
Casper Suite 9.22...
cheers

I've tried using AAMMEE and CC packager.....

[spalmer]

I just came across this issue and I believe it is due to a bug in Casper Admin (I tested with 9.32 but have not yet tested with 9.61 as we have only been on this version for about a week now) where it is not copying symlinks properly.

After realizing something was happening only after you updated InDesign or InCopy I found some errors in the /private/var/logs/install.log referencing these plugins. It seems that Adobe's updaters were having problems with the plugins mentioned in the error messages and would cancel the upgrade, but not before the plugins were corrupted. With further testing using Creative Cloud Packager I found that everything worked fine if you created a package that did not include updates (and you didn't immediately run updates manually afterwords).

After the failed updates ran I looked at the contents of the plugins that were causing the errors I found that the usual structure with symlinks didn't look quite right. Not to mention the file size for the plugin was much larger than it should be. For example, the standard structure should be:

PluginName.InDesignPlugin
  PluginName (symlink to ./Versions/A/PluginName)
  Resources (symlink to ./Versions/A/Resources/)
  Versions
     A
        _CodeSignature
        PluginName
        Resources
     Current (symlink to ./A/)

However, what I found was that in place of each symlink was a copy of what the symlink pointed to.

Tracing this back a step further I found that the specific plugins causing errors due to missing symlinks were stored in the installer package created by CCP as uncompressed copies:

Adobe InDesign CC 2014_Install.pkg (or whatever you named your installer in CCP)
  Contents
    Resources
      Setup
         IDSN10.0en_US
           payloads
             AdobeInDesign10AppBase-mul
               OEM_
                 Adobe InDesign CC 2014
                   Plug-Ins
                     InCopyWorkFlow
                       Assignment UI.InDesignPlugin
                       InCopy Bridge UI.InDesignPlugin
                       InCopy Bridge.InDesignPlugin
                       InCopyExport.InDesignPlugin
                       InCopyExportUI.InDesignPlugin
                       InCopyImport.InDesignPlugin

Adobe InCopy CC 2014_Install.pkg (or whatever you named your installer in CCP)
  Contents
    Resources
      Setup
        AICY10.0en_US
          payloads
            AdobeInCopy10AppBase-mul
              OEM_
                Adobe InCopy CC 2014
                  Plug-Ins
                    InCopyWorkFlow
                      InCopy Bridge UI.InDesignPlugin
                      InCopy Bridge.InDesignPlugin
                      InCopyImport.InDesignPlugin
                    UI
                      InCopyFileActions.InDesignPlugin

I found that after copying them up via Casper Admin all of the symlinks were replaced by copies of what they were pointed to. During the middle of this we migrated our packages (even though we are on an AFP share) and found the issue happened regardless of whether or not Casper Admin zipped these non-flat packages before uploading.

The only way I could get it to upload without corrupting any symlinks in these packages was to zip them myself and manually copy them directly to the CasperShare using the Finder (thus bypassing Casper Admin).

I found that this was in issue with both the CC and CC 2014 versions of InCopy and InDesign. I was also able to repeat this with some very basic non-flat packages I created using Composer with some simple applications that contained symlinks so I know this is not just an issue with packages created by CCP or AAMEE. I also know at some point previous to Casper 9.32 this bug did not exist because I had previously copied these CCP created packages (with updates packaged in) up via Casper Admin without any issue.

I did report this to JAMF Support and got it filed as a bug under defect D-007918. So if this appears to be the same issues you are having please report it to JAMF support and reference this defect number so that this will hopefully bump the priority on getting this fixed.

[spalmer]

Looks like this was fixed in the 9.62 update released today. I will definitely be testing this as I have some new Creative Cloud Packages to upload via Casper Admin.