VMware Horizon Community
mrstorey303
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎06-05-2018 07:00 AM

Horizon Client - Installer Adds Entry To Local Hosts File

Anyone know why the Horizon View Client for Windows (v4.8 in my case) adds the following entry into the local hosts file?

127.0.0.1 view-localhost # view localhost server

What purpose does this serve?  We're getting reports from some users where the install in failing because their AV or local privs to the OS is denying them access.

Any ideas why this is needed?

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sjesse
Leadership
Leadership
‎06-05-2018 07:26 AM

Looks to be new in 4.8, I don't see it in 4.7. I see a vmware-plugin entry though which may be the same thing. Looking at listening ports on my desktop I see

[HTML5VideoPlayer.exe]

connected to 127.0.0.1 which is probably releated, a lot of those processes start with the client. There is a horizon windows service that gets setup along with the horizon client, I think some of the newer horizon features use this service to do the redirections it needs. Hopefully someone has a more concrete answer but I'm pretty sure its just an internal process, which is not an abnormal thing for  a software to do.

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mrstorey303
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎06-05-2018 07:37 AM

Ahh - thanks for the quick response.  So looks highly likely it's the html content redirection service.  Thanks.

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BenFB
Virtuoso
Virtuoso
‎06-06-2018 08:45 AM

This is not new behavior and we've seen the Horizon Client do this for years going back at least the 3.x clients. I just checked and see it on the 4.5 and 4.7 clients.

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scottcopus
Contributor
Contributor
‎09-15-2022 11:17 AM

Attention VMware programmers:  Please fix this.  Editing the hosts file doesn't seem like good practice to me.  Please find another way.  This causes issues with some software such as SAS Enterprise Miner... http://support.sas.com/kb/55/227.html.

If anyone comes across this issue in your environment, check out the following bit of PowerShell that should help fix the issue with SAS by tweaking the hosts file after the Horizon Client is installed... https://www.reddit.com/r/vmware/comments/em1dvx/comment/iok744e/.  Basically if you update the hosts file to also include "localhost", SAS should start working again:

127.0.0.1 localhost view-localhost # view localhost server

thanks,

Scott  

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