Tuesday, August 12, 2014

AppV 5 - Short file names are not created after publishing a new version of an application



Our AppV packages are loaded on Citrix PVS servers.  The PVS server is clean, and on each restart (restarts once a day) it will contact a AppV publishing server and pull down and mount the packages.
We have an application that makes file system calls in the 8.3 space (awesome, I know).  When launching the application I can see a trace of it hitting 8.3 name spaces (via Procmon) and the application works without issue.  So, we required a tweak to the package, I added to the management server, published the application and refreshed on the AppV Client, saw the new package get loaded and ran the application.  Only now when I trace via Procmon.exe I can see that it's using Long File Names instead of the 8.3 name space and the program errors out because it's trying to find a .exe with the short name.  I can confirm the original published package has the 8.3 namespace via dir /x and the new version does NOT.
8 dot 3 is enabled for the volume
8 dot 3 exists for folders but not files...
In the image above, the version 1E65...... was published to the server first and EE168.... is the new version published later in the day.
I have VFS folders in this package and 8.3 names are not created for the new package either.  :/

While attempting to create a 8.3 file name manually I got a NAME COLLISION and a failure to create it(?)
So it appears if you have an application that does not properly support LFN (Long File Names) then it may not operate correctly if you update an AppV package, at least until the next restart (for some reason for us it creates the LFN after that).

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