Funny fatal effect of machine name for the App-V Sequencer…
Posted by Jacques on Thursday, 28 August 2008
I took me a while to find out why I was not able to build working sft packages with the new App-V Sequencer 4.5 RC…
I set up a virtual vista reference machine on my Hyper-V server and installed the Sequencer 4.5 RC. The only package I was able to produce was puTTY: what a performance. The name of my VM was "soft". Than I duplicate this VM, de-installed the Sequencer 4.5 and installed the old version 4.2. With Softgrid Sequencer 4.2, I was able to sequence nearly every application. The only difference in my environment was the version of the Sequencer…
Was it really the only difference? Think "out-of-the-box"! Another fatal difference was the name of the virtual machine: Soft to Soft42.
What’s happened under the cover? When intercepting all IOs during monitoring and sequencing, App-V "anonymizes" the current user’s SID with the variable %SFT-SID% and the computer name with %COMPUTERNAME%. This happens with blind general string replacement. Thus intercepted HKLM/Software/MyApp got transformed into HKLM/%COMPUTERNAME%ware/MyApp for example. It’s funny, but of course, it’s fatal!
Can you imagine what happens if you name your Sequencing machine "App" or "Win", or even "S"? I suppose, you’ll get huge packages, but I doubt that they will work 
So better choose a very specific name for your App-V Sequencer machine…
