Silently install VNC on remote computers with PowerShell

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Adam Bertram

Adam Bertram is a 20-year IT veteran, Microsoft MVP, blogger, and trainer.

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VNC is one of the most popular remote desktop control products out there. It's free and comes in many different flavors that administrators can pick from. Regardless of which software you use that implements VNC, they all require a software installation on the server (the computer you're connecting to) and the client (the computer initiating the connection).

If you're a desktop administrator, I'm sure there's been a time whenever you needed to VNC to a user's desktop, only to find that VNC was not installed yet. At that point, you might have talked the user through installing VNC on the server from a file share somewhere on the network. However, this takes time and resources, so it's much better to automate this process and directly send the installation files remotely, with no user interaction at all. In this article, I'll show you how to build a PowerShell script that allows you to remotely install UltraVNC on as many computers as you need.

Before we get too far, however, we first need to figure out the switches required to make the install silent. Depending on the software, this might be either an easy experience or an incredibly frustrating one. While browsing in Itninja's software library, I discovered that I needed to first perform a single install and save all the answers I provided to in an INF file with the /saveinf switch.

Setup.exe /saveinf="C:\silentinstall.inf"

This will save a file called silentinstall.inf to the root of my C drive.

Next, I need to figure out how to use this answer file when installing UltraVNC on another computer. This is possible using the /loadinf switch and passing the file name in the same manner.

Setup.exe /loadinf="C:\silentinstall.inf"

This works, but doesn't make the install completely silent like I need it to be. To do that, I need to add another switch to this: /verysilent.

Setup.exe /verysilent /loadinf="C:\silentinstall.inf"

When executed, this syntax will silently install UltraVNC with all the same answers I initially provided, which are manually saved in the INF file. Great! We now have the ability to silently install this software on a machine. However, we have no way to do this to remote computers. The way it is now, we’d have to manually copy the setup.exe and the INF file to remote computers. This is very inefficient. Let's automate all of this with a PowerShell function.

Since we already have everything necessary to perform the install locally, now we need to first figure out where we're going to store the setup.exe file and the INF file. We’ll learn how to make these files accessible to every computer, deliver those bits to a remote computer, and execute the install remotely.

Because we'll probably need to reference the installer bits over and over again, it's a good idea to place them on a file share somewhere on the network. I'll put them on a share called ToolShare on my MEMBERSRV1 server.

$InstallerFolder = '\\MEMBERSRV1\ToolShare\VNC'

Next, I need to copy the setup.exe and the INF file to remote computers on demand. To do this, I Copy-Item to do a simple file copy of the entire VNC folder.

$ClientName = 'MYCLIENT'
Copy-Item –Path $InstallerFolder –Destination \\$ClientName\c$ -Recurse

Next, I need to invoke the install remotely. PowerShell remoting is an excellent way to make this happen. I'll use the Invoke-Command to remotely execute the silent install from my computer.

To do this, I first need to wrap the command I need to run in a scriptblock.

$scriptBlock = {
   Start-Process "C:\VNC\setup.exe" -Args "/verysilent /loadinf=`"C:\VNC\silentinstall.inf`"" -Wait -NoNewWindow
}

You can see I'm using the Start-Process cmdlet to kick off the installer on the remote computer and am passing the silent arguments.

Next, I need to execute this script on the remote computer with the Invoke-Command cmdlet.

Invoke-Command -ComputerName $ClientName -ScriptBlock $scriptBlock

This sends instructions to $ClientName to run the code inside of the scriptblock. After this is complete, we're done! UltraVNC is installed. However, we've now left that C:\VNC folder on the remote computer. Let's clean that up.

Remove-Item \\$ClientName\c$\VNC -Recurse

We've now installed UltraVNC and cleaned up any remnants we've left behind. If you like this approach, feel free to download the Deploy-VNC script from my Github repo. It encapsulates all of this code into a PowerShell function and includes better functionality.