NetworkSydney

If you need to configure timeout settings for your XP desktops in a VDI solution when using Citrix XenDesktop, take a look at the artice CTX117446 at the Citrix website. This article lists the registry entries that need to be modified to enable and set the Idle timer and disconnected idle timer. Unfortunately there is not ICA connection properties similar to Presentation Server configurations. These registry settings can then be transformed into a ADM file and deployed via group policy.

It seems Citrix can’t come up with anything new so they are looking for things to do. Why I say this? Well, I have been sitting here trying to figure why the new Citrix XenApp Plugin/Client (whatever the hell you want to call it) can’t create a simple custom ICA connection. After googling around for 15 minutes I find others on the Citrix forum complaining about the same thing. I am not sure if it is a bug or not, but it seems like Citrix has decided to remove the feature to add a custom ICA connection WITHOUT contacting the XML browser. I mean maybe it is an attempt to channel people to do best practice deployments but to me removing a useful way of connecting to Citrix servers is stupid. Maybe resources should be spent on new technologies rather than removing fine details such as custom ICA connections and renaming products from winframe to metaframe to presentation server to XenApp.

Oh! it seems the easiest workaround is to paste the address of the server from clipboard as soon as you click on the name field.

I recently had a request to modify an existing MSI package to suit a customers’ needs. Items such as installing to a custom folder on a different drive letter was required. This particular requirement (installing to a different drive and folder) was interesting particularly with WISE package studio. It seems with WISE package studio modifying the INSTALLDIR parameter in the GUI is not so straight forward. The INSTALLDIR field doesn’t actually allow you to type something in. The workaround I found was in an article stating that a custom action needs to be included which will set the INSTALLDIR.

The article can be found at the following link, the section I refer to is towards to end of the page.

http://www.myitforum.com/forums/m_42293/mpage_1/key_Installs%252Cdrive%252Cmost%252Cspace%252E%252E%252E/tm.htm#42293

It seems that there is a function with the Wise package which actually installs the software to the drive with most amount of free space (or something along those lines).

When installing Citrix Web Interface version 4.0, remember to not install or remove if installed the .net framework 2 and greater. The effects of this situation are the loss of the button to create a new site in the Access Suite Console.

For some reason when I tried to install the IBM Director System Availibity Agent and the ServeRAID Manager for Director Agent onto a terminal server the install would constantly fail. The error brought to the screen would mention something about the installation being interrupted and that I needed to restart the installation to continue. However even after restarting I would get the same error. Although the server is a terminal server, I was not placing the server into install mode when installing. My understanding is that install mode should be used with all applications and must be used with user applications being installed onto the terminal server. However it seems these two additional agents needed to be installed using install mode even though they will not be used by the end users, not even by an administrator logging onto the console of the server.

One thing that caught me by surprise was the display memory allocation in Citrix. This setting, which can be set at the farm or server level, dictates how much display memory is allocated to the ICA session. By default this is set to 5MB which should work with most single monitors, however with dual monitors things may act a little funny. The Display Memory size required can be calculated by resolution x colour depth, or by looking at the session information of a logged on user.

I was caught out when I published the same application with a higher colour depth and some users with dual monitors couldn’t drag their applications all the way across to their second monitor. Initially I thought this was due to the memory allocation and that I had to allocate more memory, although this solution did and would have worked it meant more memory utilization and potentially less users on a single server. After understanding a little more about ICA Display Memory, I reduced the published application colour depth to 256 colours and this allowed the user to move their seamless application across dual monitors without me having to increase the default ICA Display Memory allocation.

I was recently given the task of upgrading an existing JD Edwards Terminal Server/Citrix farm, which included an OS upgrade, Citrix upgrade, hardware upgrade and domain migration - talk about scope creep! After mucking about with the usual things like group policy etc, I time had arrived to test the application. As an administrator this worked fine however as a standard user everything just fell apart. After doing some interrogation work with filemon and regmon (use the latest version as you can see the access denied messages easier) it was clear that some permissions were restricting the application for functioning. The application (or maybe just the version we have) really insisted on writing and reading from HKCR (Classes Root). After some googling etc, I figured out that HKCR is a merge of HKLM\Software\Classes and HKCU\Software\Classes and that simply providing write access under the administration session was not enough to give everyone write priveleges, which is not good practice and can be addressed in (apparently) a number of different ways such as AIE or Application Isolation. Since HKCR is a merge of the two hives, assigning the write privileges at the HKLM\Software\Classes area seemed to apply it to each users HKCR which inevitably becomes usrclass.dat after the first logon. Usrclass.dat is located in the users’ profile and loaded on consecutive logons.

Had some fun with Citrix PS4 and auto-created client printers over the past couple of days. The scenario was to use the Citrix UPD for all client printers and to set the Default printer setting and keep it. Initially I thought if I use the citrix policy to use the local default printer as the default printer in the citrix session, this would be sufficient and would stay the way it is. However this policy for some reason or another didnt work very well, I applied latest hotfixes/service packs etc… but still no go. I was just about to give up on client printers and use network printers when I came across a tool to roam the default printer setting. Highly recommended.

 http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=1270