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Qlik Sense Installation error: "Hostname cannot be null or empty"

Article Number: 000007907 | Last Modified: 2018/06/12

Description

When an administrator tries to install Qlik Sense, however, an error returns with "error exception occurred", looking at the installation logs, the reason is due to "Hostname cannot be null or empty", which indicates the Qlik Sense installer had problems locating the Hostname.

Cause

This is mainly an environmental issue where the installer is not able to retrieve the Hostname from the system.

Resolution

The workaround is to install Qlik Sense silently and specify the Hostname.

Staging:
- Download the Qlik Sense Server executable file.
- Save it to a temp folder. ( Ex. C:\temp )

Workaround:

Select/Run a Command Prompt as Administrator (right click CMD > Run As Administrator).
In Command Prompt dialog, change the directory to the temp folder where the executable file was saved.
Type: Qlik_Sense_setup.exe /s -hostname qlik.hostname.com. <replace with your own hostname>
Use Enter key to run the command.
There will be no indication things are running given the silent option, however, you can see the installation progress by browsing to the installation log temp folder, located at C:\Users\<User Profile>\AppData\Local\Temp.
After a number of minutes, go to windows services, search for the Qlik Sense services.
There will be 7 services if a Central Node option was selected, and the services should show as status of "running".
Since the installation was run in silent mode, the services will be running as "Local System".
The service account may be changed to a service account that is part of the local administrators group (be sure to leave the Qlik Sense Repository Database service running as "local system"), click 'apply' to make the change, but do NOT restart the services yet.
Restart the Qlik Sense Repository Database service first, this will restart all most of the other Qlik Sense services due to service depencies
Restart the Qlik Sense Dispatcher Service as it is not included in the list of dependencies.

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