Citrix Provisioning Services Agent Installed Successfully. NOT!

One of my colleagues, Henk Hofs, came across this nasty and annoying problem with performing an unattended installation of the Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) Agent.

When you perform an unattended installation by using whatever ESD solution you have. The log file will tell you that the installation was successful. When you correctly assigned a VHD to the server on which you installed the PVS Agent, the PVS Agent may complain that it does not have a connection to the PVS Server.

You may think, what did I do wrong? Well, maybe nothing.

If you look at the log file of a manual installation of the PVS Agent, you will see the following entries.

_CALOGGING                    StartDriver – start

_CALOGGING                    StartDriver – StartService returns=0

_CALOGGING                    Install – end

If you look at the log file of an unattended installation (through ESD), you will see the following entries.

_CALOGGING                    StartDriver – start

_CALOGGING                    Service does not exist – cfsdep2

_CALOGGING                    Install – end

To fix the issue, cfsdep2.inf has to be installed seperately. To do this unattendedly, execute the following command.

Rundll32.exe setupapi,InstallHinfSection DefaultInstall 129 c:Program FilesCitrixProvisioning Servicesdriverscfsdep2.inf

(DO NOT USE QUOTES!!)

The integer 129 represents the option always reboot. This can be changed to any of the following options.

128 – do not reboot

129 – always reboot

130 – always ask user for reboot

131 – reboot if necessary , do not ask user

132 – reboot if necessary, ask user