Steve Dolphin | Senior Solutions Architect

Thinapp and Creative Suite 5 – removing the fonts

My ThinApp’d copies of CS5 applications were taking along time to start, up to two minutes per application which is fine if you’re patient, but if you’re expecting a startup time similar to that of a locally installed program then you start to wonder what’s gone wrong…

So I thought I’d try and make them start faster, the biggest improvement seemed to occur when I deleted the %FONTS% directory from my capture (I also got rid of some other folders I didn’t think should be there, such as the driveC and so on, they had almost nothing in them. My .dat files are only about 200MB lighter now, but the speed up in starting times is drastic, down to about 30 seconds as a result.

As all three applications had the same “standard” fonts I decided to just make the fonts available to each machine as an installable MSI following instructions much like these ones. I also had a quick look over here: http://blogs.vmware.com/thinapp/2010/01/thinapp-troubleshooting—repost.html and followed their advice about turning off the automatic services.

ThinApp CS5 and RES – fixing the permissions issue

In a previous post I talked about ThinApp’ing Adobe Creative Suite CS5 and how to disable all the prompts so that end users aren’t bothered all the time. I then ran into a different issue, due to the way that Adobe code their products they write a file to “Program Files Common”, which of course with ThinApp is redirected, without read/write access for the current user. This then breaks roaming profiles as the file can’t be copied to and from the server.
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ThinApp Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5) – Disabling all the prompts

So, there are quite a few bits and bobs out there about CS5 but none that tell me all the things I want to know in once place.

Let’s start by point out the useful “thinapphelper” tool for those of you who aren’t aware of it: http://www.cis.nl/thinapphelper – it’s a nifty tool that allows you to inspect everything that’s going into a build, the most useful part of this for me is that it allows me to delete any temporary files that I may not want to be within the package.
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ThinApp – Discovering vregtool.exe to examine .tvr files

Note: There is a bug in ThinApp 4.7.0 (update expected end of April 2012) that stops this from working.

As part of my deployment of Adobe Creative Suite 5 via ThinApp I had to capture an installation of Adobe Acrobat Pro 9.3 – the project pages on this were helpful, and I deleted the locally installed PDF printer before completing the capture but I obviously missed something because each time I started the application as a new user I got a prompt for the Customer Experience / Improvement programme or whatever. No amount of using procmon could lead me to the file that was being changed, until I realised it was a registry key. And then I realised that I should have made sure this didn’t happen before I finished my capture, and then I was sad.

But, all was not lost, I noticed in the roaming thinstall directory that there was a file called “Registry.rw.tvr” and I thought “that sounds like it might contain registry information”, and sure enough it DOES. It contains the incremental sandbox changes to the registry, so all I needed to do was inspect it, identify the relevant value and then put that back into the ACTUAL thinapp build. I found this blog post which guided me in the right direction and I also found I guide for vregtool.exe in ThinApp 4.6, which provided some more info.

So, once I’d established that I just threw the .tvr file out into a text file (which is the same format as the HKLM/HKCU files in the root of the build directory) and copied across the relevant stuff, rebuilt and voilla!

vregtool.exe "..\Captures\Adobe Acrobat 9.3.0\Registry-CustomerImprovementProgram.rw.tvr" ExportTxt .

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Application Virtualisation

For one of my first projects this year I’ll be looking at Application Virtualisation – streamlining application deployment by creating single executable files which can then run on any workstation, there are some obvious advantages to this such as centralised deployment and maintainance, as well as the speed at which new applications can be provisioned using such methods.

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SCEP on Windows 2008R2 for iPhones / iPads

A project never really finishes, if you’re lucky you complete the initial requirements and get those signed off, and if you’re good at managing your project you’ll refuse to allow the scope creep in and mark any additional feature requests as “phase 2″ and evaluate them at a later date. One of the nice-to-haves with the deployment of iPhones was a VPN system so that you could access the internal systems when out of the office, and to date this has been in a very “test and dev” environment with access only for IT staff in a completely non-supported way.

However, I’ve found myself with a bit of time and so I started delving into the SCEP world for issuing certificates to iPhones which I would then later use to authenticate an SSL VPN connection, and here’s what I found.
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The Collective – Roam, English Subtitles

I hope I don’t get sued to high heaven for this sort of thing…

I recently translated the Portuguese subtitles from the Roam DVD (it’s a mountain biking film by The Collective) into English for a friend so I thought I’d upload them on the off-chance that one day someone happens to be looking for them, they’re not perfect but anyone’s welcome to them:

The Collective – ROAM – English

Quick: vmware tools on freebsd

I’ve never bothered installing vmware tools on my freebsd systems, but as it’s Christmas and we’re doing various pieces of maintenance I thought, “why not?”

In order to do this I first needed to install the compat6x port:

cd /usr/ports/misc/compat6x/ && make install clean

I then mounted the freebsd.iso from the vmimages folder, mounted the cdrom into existing folder (/cdrom) and copied the folder to the temporary directory before extracting and installing:

mount -t cd9660 /dev/acd0 /cdrom cp /cdrom/vmware-freebsd-tools.tar.gz /tmp tar -xf /tmp/vmware-freebsd-tools.tar.gz ./vmware-tools-distrib/vmware-install.pl

Upon completion the installer then runs the first time required config to set up the installation.

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NAS comparison: iomega and netgear

As you will know, I’ve had no end of problems with iomega NAS boxes (and customer support for that matter), and so with a recent purchase decided to test the market again and purchase a different product.

Back in the day we had some Netgear ReadyNas boxes, little desktop units offering 2-3TB of network storage which was ideal for backups. The ReadyNas boxes weren’t special in any way, the interface was decidedly average and the software had a few quirks, but they did have one brilliant feature – they hardly ever stopped working.

So, I decided to give them a go again and have since done a direct comparison between the previously-complained-about iomega units and the newly-purchased netgear ones. There are a couple of differences you should know before you worry about the performance though: 1) the netgears are considerably more expensive; 2) the netgears come with a much better warranty.
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