Citrix and the ODBC Administrator: Not so perfect together.
I was tasked with building a test server so that a client could test a new feature in a hotfix that was going to be applied to their software package. The server is installed with software and configured to look like a mirror of their production box, right down to the hardware on which the software runs and I’ve done this many times before so I didn’t think this was going to be a huge problem. As soon as that sentence entered my thoughts, I should have known better.
Once the hardware was secured and the OS (Windows Server 2003 SP2) was installed, it was time to get about the business of making this look like the client’s production environment. Two of the tasks involved in this were…
- Installing Citrix so that the client could access the box for testing, and
- Adding system DSN’s via the ODBC administrator so that data could be pulled from SQL server to the locally installed database application (to be installed later).
Citrix came first. Once that was completed, I opened the ODBC administrator and found to my horror that when I either tried to create a new system DSN, the ODBC administrator shut down the second you hit the configure button. I won’t bore you with the details, but this led to myself and the intrepid I.T. staff I work with running down several plausible, but incorrect and time-wasting paths (A missed Windows software update? Bad disk cluster? Bad OS install? Me being the pawn of a vengeful supreme being’s sick sense of humor?). Fortunately, as with so many other things, the interwebs came to our rescue because huddled in an obscure little corner of the web was the solution to our problem.
Once the frustration was vented and our thoughts were collected, we actually did something we should have done from the beginning: looked at the event logs from when the ODBC administrator failures occurred. We found this stream of jibberish:
0000: 41 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74 Applicat
0008: 69 6f 6e 20 46 61 69 6c ion Fail
0010: 75 72 65 20 20 6f 64 62 ure odb
0018: 63 61 64 33 32 2e 65 78 cad32.ex
0020: 65 20 33 2e 35 32 36 2e e 3.526.
0028: 33 39 35 39 2e 30 20 69 3959.0 i
0030: 6e 20 75 6e 6b 6e 6f 77 n unknow
0038: 6e 20 30 2e 30 2e 30 2e n 0.0.0.
0040: 30 20 61 74 20 6f 66 66 0 at off
0048: 73 65 74 20 35 62 62 33 set 5bb3
0050: 31 32 64 65 12de
The key to this mess is this snippet: 5bb312de
This is the address in memory where the access violation is created by the Citrix Virtual Memory Optimization service. In order to not see this again, you simply turn off that service.
