BenV's notes

If you’ve ever had the burden of being an admin of an office with imbeciles that use AccountView you probably already lost a bunch of hairs over it, if it didn’t push you to angry KILL CRUSH DESTROY mode (yet). Fortunately my encounters with the product are usually only in the form of “kill -9 hanging task AVWIN.EXE” or “recover from last night’s backup“. (when will those idiots start using a real database as backend instead of those easily corrupted DBF/CDX files…. idiots. Then again, the horrible garbage still uses FoxPro, so color me surprised.)
Today my boss forwarded me an email with the corresponding ‘Here, update instructions, go fix!‘ command. After a few sighs, a download and a backup of the current installation (version 9.2) I went to work.
Start the installer, next a few times, point it to the old … wait, why can’t I select the network folder that we have the old one installed on?
Apparently since version 9.3 you can’t select non local folders anymore, no matter if you select the server/standalone/workstation install.
Giving it a mapped folder location like “Y:\AccountView9” resulted in a no such location or permission denied message.
Great.
Just great.
But then I got this idea: What if I give it a symlink on a local folder?

C:\Users\Administrator> mklink /D "C:\AccountView9" "\\192.168.1.2\AccountView\AccountView9"
symbolic link created for "C:\AccountView9" <<==>> "\\192.168.1.2\AccountView\AccountView9"

Next I went through the 9.4a installer again and pointed it to the C:\AccountView9 symlink. Result?
“SURE THING! Did you know that there’s an old installation in that folder?”
Ha. I WIN 😉