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Showing posts from 2012

Windows Security Update (KB2753842) Causes OTF Fonts To Disappear

Hello, I recently came across an issue where clients where experiencing missing fonts when viewing a PowerPoint project in presentation .  They could view the fonts correctly in editing mode no problem at all but when they went to presentation mode, they just disappeared. This problem doesn't happen when you're using TrueType Fonts at all, just OpenType Fonts and if you were to drop the font size down to 12 or below, the OTF fonts show correctly in presentation mode. The CAUSE is a Windows Security Update which addressed some security holes with OTF files.  There a quite a few WSUS servers which are set to install Security Updates by default, so I recommend you decline this update asap but only for client platforms as it's not likely you'll be using a client side app on a server. The RESOLUTION.  Well to remove the update in Add/Remove but in order to remove the update in a silent manor different commands are required for XP and Windows Vista/7 workstations.  I

Cubby - Storage sync

Hi I had a problem...........I use dropbox, I have about 6GB space after referrals etc.  I love the product, the fact it is multi platform and integrates so tightly.  The problem is space. Ok 6GB for free is great!  But my photos folder is 35GB and my music is around 32GB.  Sure I could cut these down in either quality or quantity, but I do not want to do that. I have an Asus Laptop, a Shuttle server and a Mac Mini (as media center) at home and keeping files in sync between each other would be good with Dropbox, but I don't want to spend lots of money for something that is an elaborate version of robocopy. Enter Cubby.  It is a tool currently in beta from LogMeIn.  The idea is pretty much identical to Dropbox but for a killer feature called DirectSync. This allows online computers to directly sync with one another, rather than going via the cloud.  Perfect for my scenario and I would imagine lots of other people.  As you can see in the screenshot below, you create folders

Wyse ThinsOS 7.1 resolutions

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Hi there! My company uses a large set of Wyse ThinOS terminals all the way from the old 1200LE to the new T10. The T10 is a cracking piece of kit, dual monitor in a tiny form factor which can also handle Citrix HDX and boot in seconds....it is pretty neat. For this reason we have been keen to replace some of the old 1200LEs and S10 devices with the T10.  Intially this was held up due to the session reliability issue I blogged about a while ago http://www.teamas.co.uk/2012/06/wyse-thinos-71-session-disconnecting.html This was fixed with hotfix 130 (7.1_130). The latest problem we had was with custom resolutions.  We use a WNOS.ini file to configure the terminals with a fairly basic configuration.  This will tell the terminals to use the DDC to determine the best resolution of which the monitor and device can handle. We then use a username.ini file when the user logs in, this will start the appropriate Citrix session for them.  This will also launch at the best resolution f

Lync 2010 Mobility Autodiscover

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Recently I have been configuring a Lync 2010 environment as a PoC for IM and presence for my company. The PoC includes using IM and presence from the desktop and on mobile devices.  This requires an edge configuration and reverse proxy using TMG 2010. I found the following blog post which is great for setting up mobility http://blog.schertz.name/2011/12/deploying-the-lync-2010-mobility-service/ Everything was configured included DNS names, certificates, software install etc.etc. Once I had everything configured I found that if I tried to connect using my iPad device it would provide the following error message. Can't connect to the server. It may be busy or temporarily unavailable. Please try again I looked at the logging and found that the Lyncdiscover URL wasn't being redirected to the configuration file required to login. Browsing to https://lyncdiscover.companyname.com would simply produce a error 403 forbidden message. I went to "more details"

Moving folders in XenApp console

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Recently one of my colleagues Chris (chrisainger.com) tried to move a folder full of  XenApp 6.0 applications to a different location in the DSC (delivery services console) tree.  This seems like it should be pretty easy but actually it is not supported in the console. When clicking and dragging a folder the cursor icon changes to inform you this is not possible.   Now moving the applications themselves works, but the not the folder containing them, sure you can move the applications one by one, but that will take a lot of time. I had a quick look and found a XenApp powershell cmdlet for this. Open powershell on a server where the XenApp SDK is installed (download from here http://community.citrix.com/display/xa/XenApp+6+PowerShell+SDK ) Add-pssnapin Citrix* (this will load the cmdlets) Move-XAfolder sourcepath destinationpath so if we wanted to move a folder called testing underneath a folder called testing you may use this line Move-XAfolder testing application

PNA Removed from Citrix Receiver 3.3

Citrix are really trying to push StoreFront to their customers.  Since Citrix client 13 they have packaged the "plugin" into Citrix Receiver.  Receiver is the framework in which plugins (Online, Offline (streamed), SSO (password manager) etc.) were managed by.  As users frequently just installed the Online Plugin it was confusing that the client needed for other operating systems was called Receiver. Citrix decided to just go ahead and force users to use Receiver for Windows and make the Online Plugin a default addition thus making the naming consistent across the board. This was ok on the whole, but since version 3.3 they have made a prompt which asks users for the URL for Citrix Storefront.  This does not accept a PNA web address and can be throughly confusing to users who are using a standard Web Interface to launch their applications! The string provided in my earlier blog post still works to remove the receiver branding and popup, but it is not like end-users wil

Updated Presence Application

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In my last post I created a small powershell script which allowed users to see who was online by using information from the Citrix XenApp data collector. I wanted to take this a little further to provide other information such as location etc. The following form is the result.  It has been designed to be used by our support team rather than staff in general. This shows the user status, the server which they are logged on to, their login time and their relative location. It also has a Remote Assist button, this will launch remote assistance and show user sessions for that particular server.  Previously our support team had to either ask users which server they were logged on to, or find them in the DSC.  By using the presence form, it will speed up this process and give them other useful information as well. The location is a tricky subject, to show this I had to add subnet IP addresses into the script. Below is a copy of the script with some information edited or remove

Presence Information from Citrix Sessions

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I was investigating a quick method of getting user presence information for our contact centre to see who is available in the business.  We do not have any unified communications tools as yet (hopefully we may get lync at some point though!) and I thought there must be a quick way of achieving this. My intial thought was creating a internal web server which acted like FourSquare, users could check in and out.  The problem is that it is useless if people do not use it. I then thought that nearly all of this information is already available through the Delivery Services Console in XenApp (app center, presentation server console, citrix management console.....or whatever it will be called next!!).  You can browse for sessions and see who is logged in and who is idle. The vast majority of people (over 90% of our users) login to the same published desktop which means 1 script will produce decent results. I created a service account which was a custom administrator to the Citrix farm

Wyse ThinOS 7.1 session disconnecting

We utilise Wyse ThinOS terminals for users at my organisation.  They connect to a full published desktop based on XenApp 6.  The Wyse terminals have been really useful as they load very quickly and configuration is easy using INI file and DHCP flags.  This means we can ship a new unit out to site with zero configuration.  True plug and play in action!!! We have started to purchase some newer terminals recently including the R10 and T10.  The R10 is a little older and originally came with 7.0 firmware.  The T10 is a newer terminal which is the replacement for C10 and S10 terminals.  It has a small form factor and can handle multi monitors very well indeed. The T10 ships with firmware version 7.1.  We have found this to be very problematic in our environment.  Users would start their desktops and get disconnected at random points in the day.  We downgraded any R10s with 7.1 firmware back 7.0 and it fixed the issue.  Unfortunately you cannot downgrade the T10!! To reproduce this pro

XenApp License Acquisition Error (-25)

We recently experienced a Citrix XenApp error when migrating our users over to the new farm.  This is documented in the following KB article http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX124790 This stopped any new users connecting the desktop. Our licence server had 1 file installed with 7 licences are various amounts purchased through the years.  Some of these were originally owned by different organisations hence the split. We found that only 1 licence was valid for SA (subscription advantage) in the licence console.  When concurrent connections for this licence were full, no more connections were allowed. We proved that all our licences had valid SA in the MyCitrix.  We tried to reallocate the licences as suggested in step 3 of the above ctx article Verify the "SA Date" column is equal to or greater than 2010.0317. If the SA date is prior to 2010.0317, you must allocate new Subscription Advantage Renewal licenses from MyCitrix.com and install them on your license

Wyse ThinOS 7.1 Xenapp USB not mapping

Hi there Wyse have recently released the 7.1 version of their ThinOS firmware.  When testing this in our environment it broke USB mapping from our Wyse terminals for Citrix XenApp 6.0. Normally USB drives are mapped under the Z drive.  We found that since 7.1 Wyse are now classing the USB drive as a removable drive, Makes sense right? Previously they classed this as a Floppy Drive, our Citrix Policies allowed Floppy drives for a select few users and we disabled removable drives.  As soon as we allow removable drives all starting working fine. Thanks Sam

Windows 2008 R2 shared files do not automatically show

We found a really annoying issue when implementing our new XenApp 6 desktop.  Users were saving files onto the desktop, but they would not appear until they pressed F5.  The users desktop is redirected to their Home Drive share.  After more investigations we found that this problem occurred for any shared drive, even if it was to \\computername\c$ of the same computer you were on. After searching the Internet we found no way to resolve this issue.  There is mention of changing a registry key to "DontRefresh" which had limited success with others but didn't work for us. We found this problem did not exist on another server in our environment and then we started looking into the differences. Eventually we found it Remove the following registry keys HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\NoRemoteRecursiveEvents HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\NoRemoteChangeNotify Restart explorer and try again! Thes