Last week, I had an interesting situation on an App-V 5.1 Full Infrastructure, which wasn’t able to pre-load the Publishing Metadata. The Infrastructure was actually operating normally and the issue didn’t affect any users by that time. You could normally publish and unpublish Packages and users were receiving the Packages that they were assigned to.
On the App-V Management & Publishing-Servers, however we started seeing the following entry (Event-ID 102) multiple times in the App-V Server-Publishing Event-Log:
Failed to pre-load publishing metadata. Message: DownloadMetadataError (URL: http://localhost:MGMT-PORT/Publishing/Metadata/) Details: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN""http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Service Unavailable</TITLE> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" Content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"></HEAD> <BODY> <h2>Service Unavailable</h2> <hr> HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable. </BODY></HTML>
The tricky thing is, that the above Event log entry is always being displayed when the App-V Server is being restarted. This happens due to a timing issue, when App-V tries to access the Publishing Metadata, when IIS is not yet fully ready to serve it. The Error 503, is therefore normal.
However, when accessing the mentioned URL we started seeing another error, which clearly showed that something is not working properly. The displayed XML stated: ‘There was an error on the server. If more information is available, you can find it by viewing the server event logs’
<?xml version="1.0"?> <Exception xmlns="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/System" xmlns:x="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <ClassName i:type="x:string" xmlns="">System.Exception</ClassName> <Message i:type="x:string" xmlns="">There was an error on the server. If more information is available, you can find it by viewing the server event logs</Message> <Data xmlns="" i:nil="true"/> <InnerException xmlns="" i:nil="true"/> <HelpURL xmlns="" i:nil="true"/> <StackTraceString xmlns="" i:nil="true"/> <RemoteStackTraceString xmlns="" i:nil="true"/> <RemoteStackIndex i:type="x:int" xmlns="">0</RemoteStackIndex> <ExceptionMethod xmlns="" i:nil="true"/> <HResult i:type="x:int" xmlns="">-2146233088</HResult> <Source xmlns="" i:nil="true"/> <WatsonBuckets xmlns="" i:nil="true"/> </Exception>
Comparing it to a healthy Full-Infrastructure, the Output was: ‘You do not have access to this information. Please check your credentials.’
<?xml version="1.0"?> <Exception xmlns="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/System" xmlns:x="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <ClassName i:type="x:string" xmlns="">System.Exception</ClassName> <Message i:type="x:string" xmlns="">You do not have access to this information. Please check your credentials.</Message> <Data xmlns="" i:nil="true"/> <InnerException xmlns="" i:nil="true"/> <HelpURL xmlns="" i:nil="true"/> <StackTraceString xmlns="" i:nil="true"/> <RemoteStackTraceString xmlns="" i:nil="true"/> <RemoteStackIndex i:type="x:int" xmlns="">0</RemoteStackIndex> <ExceptionMethod xmlns="" i:nil="true"/> <HResult i:type="x:int" xmlns="">-2146233088</HResult> <Source xmlns="" i:nil="true"/> <WatsonBuckets xmlns="" i:nil="true"/> </Exception>
The Solution here was rather simple, to just install the latest Hotfix Package, HF07 at the certain moment, on the App-V Servers. The affected Servers were still at App-V 5.1 RTM and after applying the latest HF, the XML Output switched back to the ‘You do not have access to this information. Please check your credentials.’ Message, which is normal.
