WebPI cookbook not working in Azure

The chef's contact (thanks Brian!) Helped me to understand the matter better. Some WebPI packages do not respect the explicit log path provided by WebPIcmd.exe. The author must patch the package to use the provided log path when installed. Thus, the options became:

• Ask the author to fix the package
• Run Chef on a new scheduled task as another user who has access to the AppData folder li>
• Edit the cookbook to execute / not execute the registry to temporarily move the AppData folder to a location where the user's system has access. Either in my custom cookbook or fork of the WebPI cookbook.

Obviously, waiting for the author (Microsoft in this case) to fix the package won't happen quickly.

Changing how Azure VM Chef works doesn't make sense as the whole idea is to provide configuration at initialization time and it just works. Plus changing the default setting can have unintended consequences and puts us in a non-standard environment.

In the short term, I decided to change the registry in my custom cookbook.

registry_key 'HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders' do
    values [{
        :name => "Local AppData",
        :type => :expand_string,
        :data => "%~dp0appdata"
        }]
        action :create
end
webpi_product 'ServiceBus_1_1' do
    accept_eula true
    action :install
end
webpi_product 'ServiceBus_1_1_CU1' do
    accept_eula true
    action :install
end
registry_key 'HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders' do
    values [{
        :name => "Local AppData",
        :type => :expand_string,
        :data => '%%USERPROFILE%%\AppData\Local'
        }]
end

      

        
        
        
      

    

This change can also be done in the WebPI cookbook and also to fix this issue for all dependent cookbooks. I decided not to approach this until after the WebPI team responded to a feature request for the framework to verify that the packages match the log path.

http://forums.iis.net/t/1225061.aspx?WebPI+Feature+Request+Validate+product+package+log+path+usage

Please go and answer this thread to try and get the team to help protect this common package issue.