Citrix Presentation Server Installation Fails: Installer Internal Error 2753 icaconf.exe. 827545c6_7013_4DE_1_8E6C_DAEE4C57F54A

My Favourite GUID

I’ve been installing all the necessary components for some product testing using Citrix Presentation Server. I was given a large Powershell script that is meant to provision the Test Environment automatically but it turned out to be extremely fragile. Consequently I’ve spent a couple of days working through installation bugs and conflicts.

It came time to install Presentation Server itself and the MSI failed with the satisfyingly geeky error message in the title.

Citrix Knowledge Base and Forums gave a few possibilities for the problem:
1) Upgrading from a previous version of Presentation Server (PS) to a newer version will fail if you have upgraded your existing PS box with a newer version of the Program Neighbourhood client than comes with your XenApp Server upgrade.

2) The installation media is corrupt.

3) There is an active RDP session into the box in which you are running the install/upgrade and that RDP session is running PN.exe

None of those seemed to apply in my case.

Then a freaking genius of a colleague made a freakingly sensible suggestion. ‘Try installing Presentation Server on a clean VM image’. The purity of the revelation transported me to ecstatic visions. Yes Yes Yes!!! Clean Image! And it WORKED.

My task now was relatively simple: Retire and devise a tax-deductible religion based on this insight. After that, look at the differences between my two VM Images and by means of good old Divide and Conquer find out why Presentation Server did not install into my Test Server Image.

Forensic Deconstruction

First, I noticed that on my clean server Image the Management Console component of PS was deselected i.e. not selected for installation. So I tried that on my Test Server. No luck. Installation failed: same error.

Second, I compared the Operating System Services and running processes on the two VMs. I made the two as identical as possible in this regard by stopping Services and Processes on my Test Server that were not running on my clean Server and then tried to install. No luck. Installation failed: same error.

Third, I compared what other Citrix products I had installed on my clean Server as opposed to my Test Server. I noticed two: Access Management Console and Citrix Plug In Pack I uninstalled ACM and then tried to install PS. No luck. Installation failed: same error.

Fourth, I uninstalled Citrix Plug In Pack and then tried to install XenApp Server. Well, Pickle my Grandmother. It actually installed. Break out the Bolly!

Then I went back and installed the Management Console (just re-ran the MSI)
(Trumpets, popping corks and unrestrained hooting fill the air. HEY YOU! Put down that FERRET!)

…so its installed.

To sum up: I uninstalled Citrix Plug In Pack, then I was able to install Presentation Server. That got rid of Installer Internal Error 2753 icaconf.exe. 827545c6_7013_4DE_1_8E6C_DAEE4C57F54A

Exactly why, I don’t know. Do you think I’m a freaking genius or something ???

Powershell Installation Failure: Not Enough Storage Is Available To Process This Command

Dem Bones Dem Bones Dem Drrryyyyy Bones

I’ve just started a project at a large software vendor that specialises in Virtualisation products. There are trillions of servers both physical and virtual everywhere including numerous test servers with leftover instances of various versions of operating systems. Consequently the test environment resembles a kind of Operating System graveyard. When you are assigned a server for your testing it could have the decaying corpse of almost any OS installed on it.

Learning Curve Approaching

I am a software guy so haven’t had overmuch to do with the installation, configuration and provision of virtual machines or virtualised apps, so its very much a learning curve for me to have to test Virtualisation products. Today I was required to install the necessary software for the test harness, part of which included Powershell 1.0

Powershell duly failed to install, giving the error message ‘Not enough storage is available to process this command.’

Who Ate My Disk ?

Well, my test server had a 34GB disk with only 1GB free. Powershell only requires 1.5MB to install so it didn’t really look like a disk space problem. Nevertheless with 97% utilisation I decided to free up space but oddly, by using ‘Properties’ on the folders could only identify about 16GB of actual usage.

A colleague then showed me that two .sys files were consuming 17GB between them; one belonging to the Page file and one belonging to the Hibernate process. So now I knew where my disk space was going. I freed up about 100 MB by deleting unneeded apps, but still Powershell wouldn’t install ‘Not Enough Storage’. My liver started to ache.

Which Powershell ?

Disk space was not really a good fit for a suspect anyway, so I checked that the Powershell version I was installing was compatible with the Operating System. Checking Control Panel -> System I found I had been bequeathed ‘Windows Server Enterprise Copyright 2007’ which I assumed to be Windows Server 2003 since 2007 < 2008. WRONG WRONG WRONG. ‘Windows Server Enterprise Copyright 2007’ is actually Windows Server 2008 and that already has Powershell integrated into the Operating System. You just need to enable it.

So, making that perfectly clear, you will get the Powershell Installation error ‘Not Enough Storage Is Available To Process This Command’ when you try to install Powershell on Windows Server 2008 because it already comes provisioned as a feature of the Operating System.

But seriously, what a numbskull of an error message: ‘Not Enough Storage’. How about something like ‘Feature already installed but requires enabling’ guys? That would have made my garden path significantly shorter.

Just Quietly
Windows Server 2008 can be identified by the line of text ‘Windows Server 2008’ written vertically along the Windows Start menu.

ObjectDataSource could not find a non-generic method that has parameters: . for a SelectMethod

So I’ve got an ObjectDataSource with its SelectMethod set to ‘GetStuffById’ and the contract is GetStuffById(int stuffId) and the error in the title comes up.

I’m thinking ‘what the…of course it’s got parameters read the flamin’ contract!. I even had a beautiful FormParameter defined in the markup.

But I left something out. Yes, I left out the parameter NAME.
That’s why there’s a single blank space in the error message between ‘parameters:’ and ‘.’ where the list of parameter names goes.

Classic.

My markup said:

asp:ObjectDataSource ID=”stuffDataSource” runat=”server” DataObjectTypeName=”StuffDto”
SelectMethod=”GetStuffByStuffId” TypeName=”StuffService” >
SelectParameters
asp:FormParameter DefaultValue=”1″ /
/SelectParameters
/asp:ObjectDataSource

Notice the FormParameter does not have a Name attribute? Yeah. Well I didn’t until about five minutes ago.

It should have read:
asp:FormParameter Name=”stuffId” DefaultValue=”1″

And yes, I’m eating my liver.

SQL Server 2005 Failure May Be Caused Because Default Settings Does Not Allow Remote Connections

Look, I don’t like to mention this…but…this error can be caused because your SQL Server 2005 service is STOPPED. (Quickly pulls paper bag over head).

So have a look in SQL Server 2005 Configuration Manager and do the right thing before anyone notices.

But can I say this error message must be one of the more obtuse of its kind? Here it is in its full glory:

An error has occurred while establishing a connection to the server. When connecting to SQL Server 2005 this failure can be caused by the fact that under the default settings SQL Server does not allow remote connections (provider: Shared Memory Provider, error 40: could not open a connection to SQL Server)

How about flamin’ well saying that the service is not running ???

For its coma-inducing combination of tendentiousness and irrelevance I vote THIS error message ‘Most Obtuse, 2009’ . Any seconders ?

More fixes for this problem are described at this excellent blog entry SQL SERVER – Fix : Error : 40 – could not open a connection to SQL Server by Pinal Dave.

Some More Obscure Error Messages

Here’s a great article called The 13 Other Greatest Error Messages Of All Time, with links to the original 13 Greatest and its comment list of 400 or so other wonderfully obscure and weird error messages.

Then try these from MYOB.