Monday 31 March 2008

SPSS and Appsense Environment Manager

I am having trouble with SPSS 15 running on Citrix Presentation servers which also has Appsense Environment Manager running. Basically, Environment Manager kills the SPSS processor. I can reproduce this consistently and fix the problem by either disengaging the EM process, removing the EM DLLs or simply removing any applied EM policies.

I have had a call open with Appsense about this for a few weeks. The only suggestion they have made so far is to upgrade to the most recent version. I did this (7.2.227), but it made no difference.

Currently I am trying SPSS 16.0, but not having much luck as our license for SPSS 16.0 is not authorised for use on a terminal server......... Hopefully I will have a call from SPSS soon to establish how I can run this test.

Has anyone seen this issue?

I will keep this post updated, but it looks like we are going to have to switch of Environment Manager on our Citrix servers and live without the good things that it does.

Tuesday 11 March 2008

SoftGrid 4.1 - Desktop Refresh Times Out - Error 10000005

I've had issues with SoftGrid today with all Desktop Refreshes failing and no applications launching. Unfortunately this happened while I was rebuilding one of the VAS servers so I wasted a lot of time trying to trouble shoot issues that could have been caused by removing this server.......

The errors I was seeing in the sftlog.txt file when trying to launch applications were:

[03/11/2008 08:00:28.370 AMGR WRN] {hap=1:app=CorelDRAW X3 13.0.0.739:tid=4FC}The SoftGrid Client lost contact with a server and entered disconnected mode.
[03/11/2008 08:00:28.385 JGSW ERR] {hap=1:app=CorelDRAW X3 13.0.0.739:tid=148C:usr=srvrjh}The SoftGrid client could not connect to stream URL 'rtsp://appstreaming.leeds.ac.uk:554/cdrawtst/cdrawtst.sft' (FS status: 1600190A-00000120).
[03/11/2008 08:00:28.385 SWAP ERR] {hap=1:app=CorelDRAW X3 13.0.0.739:tid=148C:usr=srvrjh}The client was unable to connect to a SoftGrid server (rc 1600190A-00000120)
[03/11/2008 08:00:28.432 TRAY ERR] {tid=C88:usr=srvrjh}The SoftGrid Client could not launch CorelDRAW X3 13.0.0.739.

An unexpected error occurred. Please report the following error code to your System Administrator.

Error code: 41112E-1600190A-00000120

This turned out to be nothing to do with the VAS rebuild and was actually associated with the provider policy. It seems that SoftGrid does not use native Windows authentication but instead employs LDAP. In our architecture LDAP often causes issues. We have two domains, a forest root and a child. The child domain is first in the alphabet.

Anyway, we performed some AD upgrade work at the weekend and the one domain controller in the child domain that the VAS servers could contact was offline (in case we needed to revert back the domain). We accepted the fact that users in this domain would not be able to authenticate to the VAS servers during this period, as we have no softgrid users in that domain at present. However what we did not anticipate is that because a group of users from the child domain was defined in the provider policy, SoftGrid would time out trying to contact the domain and it would break all desktop refreshes and all applications (that were not 100% pre-cached).

Microsoft states the issues we were seeing are related database problems, but I would suggest that before you do anything with your databases that you check your provider policy and look for any groups that have not been properly resolved.