General Tips for Troubleshooting AdminStudio Repackager Issues

Report Inappropriate Content · ‎Oct 18, 2018

Summary

General Tips for Troubleshooting Repackager Issues

Synopsis

This article provides general tips and steps regarding how to troubleshoot issues with the AdminStudio Repackager. On the surface the process of repackaging an application seems straight forward and simple, but it can be very complex and there are several variables that can cause issues with the repackaging process.

Discussion

Here are some tips for troubleshooting Repackager issues. If you have a Support Maintenance Plan, some of this information may be requested by the support team, so having this information readily available can save valuable time.

Information to gather for any issue:

For any issue you are having it would be beneficial to gather Windows Event Viewer logs, as well as any logging output from the repackaging process. With the Event Viewer you will want to pay close attention to the Applications log to ensure no exceptions are thrown directly from the Repackager, islc.exe, or from any runtimes pointing to the islc.exe as the source. As far as repackaging logs are concerned when using the standard Repackager ( Standalone, or Remote) it would be expected that there is a ?Build Log.txt? that will be output as part of the process. As far as logs for the Automated Application Converter there should be a Report Log html file that is written to the ?Output Path? that is specified in the AAC options. The .aacx project file will also contain logging information, and this can be viewed in a standard text editor. If you open a support case we may ask for some or all of these files. If you are using the standard Repackager it is common that support will request the project file as well, the .irp and .inc together.

1: The first thing to confirm is, ?Was this previously working and started failing, or has this never worked in the past??

A: Yes this was working, and just stopped recently.

- First thing to confirm would be, ?What changed, and could this change have caused the problem?.? Depending on how you are using the Repackager this can be a difficult issue to find the cause to. If you are using the Remote Repackager on a VM for example the best thing to do would be to revert to a known working snap shot and implement minimal changes, testing at each step, taking snapshots as necessary, until the behavior is reproduced and it can be tracked to a specific change. If Windows Updates were installed for example you could remove the newly installed updates one by one, testing in between, to see if the issue is resolved. Depending on the nature of the issue you will want to ensure you are checking the Windows Event Viewer for any exceptions that could be related. If the machine is using anti-virus you will also want to ensure this is not causing any interruptions.

- ?No changes were made to the system, this just stopped working.? This is a scenario that is extremely rare. In almost all of these cases something has changed, but the user may not always know this. You will want to ensure that no updates were made to the system, that your IT group did not introduce any new security policies that could cause an issue, and its also good to ensure that if you are using anti-virus on the machine there were not new updates to the software or definitions that may cause a conflict.

B: Yes this was working, and we just upgraded and this stopped working.

- Depending on how you are using the Repackager (Standalone, Remote, AAC, etc) you may need to go through the preparation steps again after the upgrade. For example if you are using the Remote Repackager you will want to ensure that the remote client has its mapped drives pointing to the new locations for the updated version. If you were using the AAC for example you will want to go through the Preparing a Snapshot for Repackaging steps again, and save a new updated snapshot.

C: No this was never working, we are setting this up for the first time.

- The first thing to confirm is how are you planning on using the Repackager. There are several ways to use the Repackager, and depending on how you plan to use it may involve different steps to set up. If you are using the Remote Repackager you will want to follow Launching Repackager Remotely. If you are trying to use the AAC you will want to follow Preparing a Snapshot for Repackaging.

- Another common thing to look into is to ensure that your IT group does not have any sort of polices in place that will cause a conflict. You should see if they can temporarily remove the polices on your machine, and test to verify if this changes the behavior.

- You will also want to ensure that your anti-virus is not blocking any executables from running. You can temporarily disable this to see if it resolves the issue, or if the anti-virus has an exclusion feature you can exclude the AdminStudio folder and all its executables.

- Verify if you are using a company created OS install Image or an install straight from the vendor, MSDN for example. Depending on what is installed in your corporate image for the OS some software or security settings may cause issue. If setting up a new VM and if you have access to an alternate image, like one straight from MSDN, it would be recommended to set up an image using this to verify that the Repackager does work on a new clean install. You will typically what the repackaging machine to be as clean as possible, so if you can use a clean OS image this would be recommended.

😧 This works on some systems, but not on others.

- This is another one that can be very difficult to trouble shoot. If repackaging works on one system but not another you will want to go back through the steps of if this was previously working, or if it was never working. If it is something were this was never working you will want to compare the machines to see what differs. For example the working machine does not have an application installed that the non-working machine has installed. In this regard the best step would be to remove this application to see if it was causing conflict. You will also want to compare the different policy and security settings to see if there are differences that stand out.

2: Our Repackager is set up and working, but some packages do not seem to work.

A: The package works on one repackaging machine, but not another.
- The first thing to verify is package is compatible with the OS of the machine where this does not work. If you are trying to repackage on a machine were the package is not compatible with the OS you will need to repackage on a different system.

- If both the machines have the same OS but one fails to repackage then you will want to follow the steps to determine what is different, and if these differences can explain the behavior.

B: The package does not work on any machine.
- It is not too often that this happens, but when it does occur it is best to open a support case. Once this is logged the support team will need your package to reproduce. If it can be reproduced it will most likely be something the engineering team will need to investigate further.

3: Our Repackager is set up and working, but not all the "methods" work.

- This is not common but it can happen. For example your package process fine with ?Installation Monitoring? but not with ?Snapshot Method?, or the reverse of this. In most of these cases there is something in the environment that is causing the conflict. You will want to revisit the steps above to ensure nothing on the system is causing the issue, as well as testing on other systems.

- If you are running on a Server OS, and you have the ?Remote Desktop Services? Role enabled on the server it may cause an issue with Installation Monitoring method. This is not something that has been widely reported, but has been observed in a few instances and is being looked into further.