Unnamed file contains an invalid path – ABE causing trouble in paradise

ABEToday I ran into an application issue with an application, when a normal user would start the application the application would prompt for a file. When browsing to the file and opening the file the application would throw an error message: ‘unnamed file contains an invalid path’

Situation:

The application was packaged with APP-V 4.* and was already running for ages in a Windows 2003/PS4.5/RES WM 2012 environment without any problems. During the project we’ve implemented a new environment based on Windows 2008R2 with RES Workspace Manager 2012 and tried to re-use as much packages as possible to minimize risk during the migration.

Basically the application was launched and you could browse to an application specific file to open it but the application would rapport ‘unnamed file contains an invalid path’.

Troubleshooting:

To check the file we browsed to the folder that contained the application specific files using Windows Explorer, that worked without a problem so apparently we had access to the file.

We’ve copied the file into a home directory and it would start the application without any problems and we could select this file and run the business process.

After that we tried to copy the file back into the original directory but explorer gave an error:

ABE

When we tried the file copy from the old Windows 2003 environment it would copy the file without any problem.

The solution:

That did put us in the right direction, opening the fileshare from the existing environment we could see the top level folder but when opening the fileshare from the new environment we couldn’t see the top level folder.

Apparently the sys admins turned on Access Based Enumeration (ABE) on this folder and didn’t install the component on their Windows 2003 servers. By using RES Workspace Manager for the drive mappings we could do the drive mappings without any problems but accessing the files would result in problems. The resolution was a review of the rights on the top level folder so the users could see the top level folder, after the review the file could be copied and the application could be launched with the application specific file so the business process could run.

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Kees Baggerman

Kees Baggerman is a Staff Solutions Architect for End User Computing at Nutanix. Kees has driven numerous Microsoft and Citrix, and RES infrastructures functional/technical designs, migrations, implementations engagements over the years.

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