A Couple of Gotchas Using Out of the Box Content in Application Director

I thought I would share these - not major issues if you know about them. During a recent POC these came to light and hopefully will save others some time and frustration if you are using any of the OOTB (out of the box) content (services, application blueprints, scripts, etc). As I find other gotchas I may add them to this list.

Service - Microsoft .Net Framework 4.0

THE PROBLEM - Service exits with a non-zero errorlevel causing deployment to fail.

DESCRIPTION - I attempted to use this OOTB service to install .Net 4.5, thinking I could just substitute the content property "DOTNETFX40_EXE" and the DOTNET_VERSION property with the newer version (which WILL work - that's not the bug).  However, what I discovered was that .Net installer returns a non-zero error level (for reboot required) and the INSTALL script is a somewhat elaborate cmd file that traps this error and attempts to exit with an errorlevel 0.

The reason for this is that you really want AppD to handle the reboots so that the deployment workflow is resumed properly when the system comes back up.

But, as good intended as this install cmd script is, it fails to exit with an errorlevel 0.  This is because of the way batch/cmd scripts handle vars.  Basically, the manipulation of the errorlevel works but once the conditional loop is closed the original errorlevel is reset, the script exits with a "non-zero" and the AppD workflow fails.

MY FIX - I basically removed the script's conditional loop for trapping the non-zero errorlevel and added "set errorLevel=0" as the last line in the script.  My script looks like this -

@echo off

if exist %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\%DOTNET_VERSION% (

  echo Found %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\%DOTNET_VERSION%, the .NET framework of interest appears to have already been installed.

  echo.

   echo Skip .NET 4.0 installation. 

) else (

    echo Installing .Net Framework.

    start "Install .NET Framework" /wait "%DOTNETFX40_EXE%" /q /norestart

)

echo Installation Completed.    

echo This lifecycle always reboots. Rebooting now...

REM log the error level returned by the .Net installer for troubleshooting

echo Errorlevel NOW set to %errorLevel%

REM always exit with a zero

set errorLevel=0

Service - vFabric tc Server v2.7.1

THE PROBLEM - tcServer does not install and deployment fails.

DESCRIPTION - The required properties of the service were provided (or catalog values used where appropriate).  However, the install would fail with the error that the EXTERNAL_TEMPLATE could not be found - and that property is NOT shown as required.  This property is referenced in the CONFIGURE script and you can see on line 36 of that script there's a conditional check for the property and if it's populated then it is used - otherwise, nothing is done.  I believe the problem is with the script itself in that a NULL value for that property isn't evaluated as intended.

MY FIX - Really just put in any value there.  I noticed that the OOTB jPetStore Blueprint sets the value to the darwin_global.conf path (as used in the global_conf property) and that seems to work just fine.  Of course, if you actually HAVE an external template that path should be used.  Ideally, you could modify the service and set the property there so you could just use the catalog value each time.