[51] in installers
Re: New Eudora 3.0.2 Installer
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Ragone)
Fri Apr 11 16:03:56 1997
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 1997 16:03:18 -0400
To: installers@MIT.EDU
From: Peter Ragone <pragone@MIT.EDU>
Cc: helpstaff@MIT.EDU
Hi Marshall & other developers,
Well, since you asked for feedback, here's some after using the installer
for about 1 hour or so in various ways.
1) The installer works great for standard installations of Eudora, where
all the files are in a predictable place.
2) The installer gives me the option of installing Eudora into a particular
folder. As with most of the Mac's installers it doesn't specify whether
it's going to install the files into that folder, or neatly put them into a
folder in that folder. This ambiguity leads the typical client to select to
install this package into the Eudora folder on their hard drive. The
installer then puts the Eudora Pro folder into the Eudora folder and the
client must then drag the contents into the enclosing folder and wonder
whether to "replace files with same names." Just a little annoyance. I had
one of our student consultants run the installer and he made the same
mistake.
3) The installer has no note that it runs as an ftp client, requires an
active network connection, and a ball-park figure of how long it'll take to
download Eudora at 28.8 bps or slower. Alicia said that Scott has put this
note into the new installer due out Monday.
4) For clients who have followed our official directions regarding how to
set up their Eudora 2.1.4 for multiple users, the 'placeholder file' is not
handled well during the installation process. The installer insists on
replacing that file with a Eudora Folder and Settings file. If the client
elects to "Stop", the whole download is canceled. A costly error for the
client because even at Ethernet speeds, reinstalling again is a long
process. Nothing about a previously existing multiple user setup is
addressed in the installer ReadMe file. Will this be addressed on the
updated web page?
5) We need to update the Web page describing the installation process and
remove the instruction to move the Kerberos Settings file since it appears
to come with this installation. Alicia said that Phyllis Galt may already
be working on this change.
6) "Timeout... Lost connection with the server" error occurred in 2 of our
5 installations today. Can you think of why this would happen so
frequently? A similar file corruption error happened a week or so ago with
this installer on a 7600/120, OS 7.6, and happened twice today with a
Powerbook 3400/200, OS 7.6 for 3400 v1.0. This is perhaps not as important
at Ethernet speeds as for our poor Tether users who would need to spend
another hour or so downloading the files again.
7) The new KClient 1.6.2 is great. What a relief it'll be to have clients
being able to login and report Kerberos ticket information without needing
to search for and download KConfig. There's only one further wish I would
have for this extension -- Please don't have it turn off loading with the
same key combination as rebuilding the desktop. Perhaps you could have it
look for whether ONLY the control key is pressed, not the option and
control keys together. Clients rarely notice whether the KClient icon has
an X through it during the bootup process. Many, maybe even a majority of
our clients call asking why their computer is reporting "Cannot communicate
with Kerberos" and that would exclude one of the possilities. In fact, the
new KClient will show that the client can get valid Kerberos tickets, but
they'll still get that error when they try to download email.
Thanks for reading through these comments.
Sincerely,
Peter Ragone
