I was troubleshooting an unattended installation of a particular application. The install seemed to hang right away so I figured it was presenting some kind of message (error?).

Using a Window Spy tool I made the setup process visible and saw the following message:

The unattended install was supplied by the vendor and apparently they use InstallAware.

The setup tries to create a Tray Icon, probably a setup progress indicator, but this fails because there is no shell running (the installation is pushed from a deployment server).

(more…)

I was working on an unattended installation of Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 or rather Citrix Xenapp. I was creating the dsn file for the installation by a script that uses the echo command and output this to a file.

This is a part of the script:

rem Create ODBC file
rem ———————————————————————–
echo [ODBC] > %ODBC%
echo DRIVER=SQL SERVER >> %ODBC%
echo UID=%SQL_SA% >> %ODBC%
echo Address=%SQL_SERVER%,1433 >> %ODBC%
echo Network=DBMSSOCN >> %ODBC%
echo LANGUAGE=us_english >> %ODBC%
echo DATABASE=%CTX_DATASTORENAME% >> %ODBC%
rem echo WSID=%COMPUTERNAME% >> %ODBC%
echo APP=Citrix IMA >> %ODBC%
echo SERVER=%SQL_SERVER% >> %ODBC%
echo Description=Citrix Datastore >> %ODBC%
echo. >> %ODBC%

Even though the generated DSN file looks ok the installation fails. If you look in the installation log you can see this error: Error 26009. Could not Access the datastore using the DSN file.

I then created a dsn file through the ODBC Data Source Administrator and then the installation went ok. I compared the DSN file with the one my script generated and it was the same.

A search with Google and in the Citrix forums leads to numerous posts with the same error but none with a real solution. Some suggestions are that you need to remove the WSID line or even the order of the entries in the DSN file. But none of these suggestions work.

So I compared the two files again and I noticed that the filesize of my generated DSN was slightly bigger. So let’s look again at the script:

echo DRIVER=SQL SERVER >> %ODBC%

See the space right before the >>? This means that after each line in the dsn file there’s a space too. If you open the file with a Hex Viewer you can easily see the spaces (ASCII value 20):

So the solution is to change this (for all lines) to:

echo DRIVER=SQL SERVER>> %ODBC%

After that it works perfectly!