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JohnVirtual2011
Contributor
Contributor

Can Thinapp directory isolation mode be bypassed

Hi all,

When trying to find a way to ease the packaging of applications with other packages dependencies(apps links), I've tried to launch "Setup Capture.exe" from a virtualized app command line. The behaviour was weird.

What I've done:

- Installed ThinApp 4.6.0-287958 on a clean VMware WinXP Pro SP2 machine

- Captured and built an "empty package" (named cmd) with only cmd.exe, Isolation mode set to WriteCopy

- Launched the virtual package cmd.exe

- Launched "Setup Capture.exe" from the virtual command line

- Captured again an "empty package" (named cmd-virtual) as above (this time snapshots and build are supposed to be taken from the virtual environment)

- Between Prescan and Postscan, created a dummy-virtual.txt file in "c:\program files" from the virtual command line

- Between Prescan and Postscan, created a dummy.txt file in "c:\program files" on the physical system

The result (1):

- Everything is captured on the physical system (eg the directory cmd-virtual appears on the physical system)

- Snapshots are taken from the physical system (eg "cmd-virtual\%ProgramFiles%" contains dummy.txt)

A second try:

- Added all files from "c:\program files\VMware\VMware Thinapp" (except the Captures directory) to the cmd package

- Added an entry point to "%ProgramFiles%\Setup Capture.exe" in package.ini

- Bebuilt cmd package

- Retried the capture process initiated from the virtual environnement (now the virtual environment has a Setup Capture.exe file to deal with)

- Retried using the "Setup Capture.exe" entry point

The result (2):

- Same as above

A last try:

- Renamed "Setup Capture.exe" on the physical system

The result (3):

- When trying to launch "Setup Capture.exe" from the virtual command line, it says it can't find the file (just a dir to confirm it's there)

- When trying to launch the "Setup Capture.exe" entry point, a popup window appears with the message "RelaunchUsingProcess::CreateProcess failed c:\program files\VMware\VMware Thinapp\Setup Capture.exe"

Conclusions:

At least one executable can ignore entirely the virtual environment and bypass its isolation modes: "Setup Capture.exe" from VMware Thinapp

Finally, a few questions:

- What makes this executable ("Setup Capture.exe") behaves like this? It's weird, isn't it? A bug?

- Is there a way to perform a capture from a virtual environnement?

The purpose is to have a capture environment to which I can dynamically link all required runtimes and packages. To avoid, for instance, to have to reinstall the .NET framework on a clean system even if I already have all the hard and long job to build a .NET framework package, etc... I know that this one can be adressed with VMware snapshots, but complexity of real applications dependencies can't be adressed that way.

Thanks in advance for any advice,

Regards,

John

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JohnVirtual2011
Contributor
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Hi all,

After some more researches, I found that "Setup Capture.exe" is in fact a (maybe old) ThinApp package!

Just using relink.exe on it and Bingo Smiley Happy, it can now be lauched from the virtual environnement. I think it's now possible to install and capture an application from the virtual environnement with all app linked dependencies attached!

This stuff may not be supported by VMware, though. We'll see...

What a great product! But you, VMware people, are so secretive persons Smiley Wink,

Regards,

John

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