The Top Three Rookie Mistakes - Part 3

So far in this series we've talked about failing to create and share your Content folder and we've talked about specifying the Default Content Path.  In the last installment of the series we're going to talk about defining the %SFT_SOFTGRIDSERVER% variable on the clients.

Issue #3 - Failure to define the %SFT_SOFTGRIDSERVER% variable on the clients.

By default, when you sequence (virtualize) an application, one of the dialogs you'll see is the Package Information screen in the Package Configuration Wizard.  This is where you specify the Hostname of the SoftGrid server and by default the field is populated with %SFT_SOFTGRIDSERVER%:

If you leave this field set to %SFT_SOFTGRIDSERVER% then you must define this variable on the client - the SoftGrid client does not do this for you.  If you fail to define the variable on your clients then they will fail to load and run your advertised applications.

What you should do

There are actually two different ways to approach this:

1. Define the %SFT_SOFTGRIDSERVER% variable on all of your clients.  How you do this is up to you.  Some use a policy, some use a script, but no matter how you do it just make sure it gets done.

2. You can hard code the name of the SoftGrid server in the Hostname field of the dialog above when you sequence your applications.  There are some obvious advantages and disadvantages to doing this, and personally I recommend #1 above, but with that said, I hard code the name of the server in my sequences just because it's easier for me.  Keep in mind though that I'm 100% certain that the name of my SoftGrid server will never change, I have only one, and I tend to stream my apps to one of two clients at the most.  If you're in an enterprise environment like most people are, you'll probably want to go the variable route instead.

Additional Information:

The way this works is that whatever you specify in the Hostname field gets inserted into the OSD file that's created when you import your application.  For example, if I had hard coded the name of my server (jcwin2k3vm) when I sequenced an application, the OSD for that application would look something like this:

If you look at the CODEBASE HREF line you'll see it contains a reference to the server jcwin2k3vm.  If I had left the default of %SFT_SOFTGRIDSERVER% when I sequenced my app then this line would instead reference %SFT_SOFTGRIDSERVER%.

Like I said back in Part 1, SoftGrid is an amazingly simply and straight forward solution to implement and if you keep these three things in mind you'll be streaming apps enterprise wide in no time.

Enjoy!

J.C. Hornbeck | Manageability Knowledge Engineer

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  So far in this series we've talked about failing to create and share your Content folder and we've

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  The first thing you’ll probably want to do in preparation for your callback is gather up any relevant

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  So far in this series we've talked about failing to create and share your Content folder and we've

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Nice JC, thanks for covering these three steps as they seem to always come up in forums.  Just a personal option I like to use, I hardcode a fallback location that is internet facing and then set the ASR's for local internal routing. This way if a client doesn't pick up an ASR through policy for some reason (IE. working from home), they'll fallback to the hardcoded path as its default path in the OSD.   TroyW