mozptch Utility Helps System Administrators Configure and Maintain Mozilla Installations

Tuesday May 4th, 2004

Detlef Oertel wrote in to tell us about mozptch, an automatic configuration utility for Mozilla. Designed for maintaining large numbers of Mozilla installations, mozptch allows system administrators to specify details such as where profiles are stored, set arbitary preferences and configure helper applications. It currently only runs in Windows but a Linux version is planned.

#1 Thiis is cool!

by jgraham

Wednesday May 5th, 2004 3:59 AM

Once upon a time, there was a functional client custmisation kit somewhere in the Mozilla.org CVS (or so I heard). It's nice to know that there's sometthing similar avaliable again :)

#2 This will be a GREAT help for corporate sites!

by baffoni

Wednesday May 5th, 2004 6:58 AM

I really missed being able to use the Netscape CCK, so being able to reduce the manual setup of clients will be great. Now I just need to download it and see if it is a .1 or 1.0 version, and help debug if necessary.... ;-)

#3 Re: This will be a GREAT help for corporate sites!

by Grauw

Wednesday May 5th, 2004 9:10 AM

Iirc (but I might be wrong) the Netscape CCK couldn't be open-sourced due to some proprietary code... Not sure though, but I think I read this it sometime.

~Grauw

#5 Re: This will be a GREAT help for corporate sites!

by met

Wednesday May 5th, 2004 11:13 PM

It is still possible now. You can make manuall changes directly in the installer. Is is not so difficult (but manual). One my colleague made this for JCU (one Czech University). He wrote work about it, but it is in Czech.

#4 This was definitley needed

by Gunnar

Wednesday May 5th, 2004 4:52 PM

I have already received several emails from people who were looking for a way to deploy Mozilla in a school/office environment. Together, we figured out how to to that, but I wish I had known about mozptch back then. This would have saved everyone a lot of time.

IMHO, the lack of ease of deploying Mozilla in these environments really sets Mozilla back.

#6 Making changes manually

by PC1

Tuesday May 11th, 2004 12:03 PM

I have made changes to Mozilla 1.6 and Firefox 0.8 on the Win installer directly. It is not dificult but it takes time...

I had a custom startup page and cookperm.txt and bookmarks files installed by default in addition to other features. One thing still bugs me that although the default setting is to keep cookies for current session only, Mozilla does not obay that. The cookies are not cleared on exit, and the setting is there when one opens the preferences. The only way was to make the cookies.txt file as read only; the problem is that the installer keeps changing it back on installation. Finding the personal directory of "AppData" in WinNT or 2000 is not a one click procedure and has to be done with every different user. This is not feasable in a work place/multiuser computers.

Meanwhile, I will try this utility.

#7 Re: Making changes manually

by PC1

Sunday May 16th, 2004 8:17 AM

After several attempts, I was able to find the reason for not clearing the cookies on restart. Apparently, the cookperm.txt file had the cookies allowed for some sites (as yahoo, hotmail, etc...). After I updated my cookperm.txt file and had only blocked sites in it (used sites from my hosts file and sites added by spywareblaster ending up with a total of "1587" blocked sites), the cookie behaviour went back to normal; the cookies are now being thrown out on exit.