XPlane Deployment / Jamf

[mschlosser]

My employer has a yearly daycare program where parents pay to drop there kids off at one of our campuses and then the kids can take various fun classes. This year one of the classes features the plane flight slim. I was looking at that and the installer for it is a custom .app, that asks whether you want the demo, or full version with a license key, and then it downloads about 80GBs. 

For some reason it won't let you install the app in /Applications/ saying it will cause 'problems', it defaults to ~. However you can change it to /Users/Shared, which is what i will do. By default xplane stores its activation in ~/X-Plane 12/Output/preferences/, i don't know if that could be moved to the equal computer level locale. Does anyone have any experience with deploying this app via jamf pro and SSO via Jamf Connect? Contact the vendor for multi seat advice? Build a massive composer package and pray?

thanks for the advice 

[jamf-42]

Contact vendor. An 80GB pkg is not gonna behave. You could inspect the app see if it’s using scripts etc as the 80GB will hopefully be in chunks, but.. start with vendor 

[mschlosser]

yep, thanks for the advice. see is what i said to them:

Hello,

My employer is considering purchasing multiple copies of XPlane for one of our summer education programs. They will be installed in a multi user lab style environment. I did some research and I see that x-plane stores its preferences and activation in ~/X-Plane 12/Output/preferences/

Could this folder be moved to /Library/X-Plane 12/Output/preferences/ so that is detectable by all accounts? Could you provide a more standard installer package (.pkg) to make installation easier? Are site license available for XPlane?

Thanks for any information you could provide.

M

[jamf-42]

While you wait use this to dig around the app 

https://www.mothersruin.com/software/Apparency/

and get suspicious pkg while your at it 

could be scripts could be a binary.. worth a rummage 

[mschlosser]

ah, good idea, both of those may be helpful, thanks again.