By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, April 29, 2008 3:56:57 PM

For those not familiar with SQL injection, it's in it's simplest form a method of injection a SQL statement into a database server by way of hiding it in a web parameter.  There's a more detailed explanation here.

Anyway, I wanted to throw together a quick blog entry on this because SQL injection is a very common issue that affects a large number of public websites.  Most of the webmasters are not even aware that their web site exposes them to SQL injection.  Recently, there's been a flurry of Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, April 29, 2008 7:26:56 AM

With only three weeks to go before the Citrix Synergy event in Houston, TX Barry Flanagan has posted up a list of technical sessions from the Citrix Synergy conference.  While anything could happen, I'm getting the general feeling like this might just be the most technical Citrix iForum ever.  Even if not, I'm just happy that Citrix is actually publically recognizing the Citrix Technology Professional program as opposed to treating it like the ugly red-headed stepchild (no offense to ugly red-headed stepchildren).

View the list of technical sessions in Barry's blog entry.

By Shawn Bass on Sunday, April 27, 2008 12:31:51 PM

I have been a long time supporter of the Citrix Online GotoAssist product as an excellent way for organizations to provide remote support to their internal associates, but specifically for their remote office workers, work from home employees, and third party customers/partners.  Whenever I'm able Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Wednesday, April 16, 2008 9:26:23 AM

Never in a million years did I ever expect to hear a reference to Brian Madden in a public video from Mark Templeton, but that day has come.  I was reading a blog item from Jeffrey Muir where he mentioned a video that Citrix was sending throughout the company as a commercial advertisement to re-enforce the reasons why people should attend Citrix Synergy.  Jeff posted a link to the video and I gave it a listen.  Surprisingly, Mark talks about the Geek Speak Live section of the conference that several of the Citrix Technology Professionals (including myself) will be speaking at.  This is a great thing as it's becoming clear that Citrix is really beginning to recognize the CTP program and evangelize it within the organization.  If yo ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Wednesday, April 16, 2008 7:21:57 AM

I have a customer that is performing an upgrade to Presentation Server 4.5 right now.  The way I setup their deployment is that the server is built with 2003 SP2 and then an unattended build of PS 4.5.  Then after the server is joined to the farm, there's an Installation Manager package group of about 50 core components that are pushed to the server.  From a Citrix hotfix perspective, the following items are deployed:

PSE450W2K3R01.msp  - Hotfix Rollup Pack 1

PSE450R01W2K3003.msp
PSE450R01W2K3004.msp
PSE450R01W2K3007.msp
PSE450R01W2K3008.msp
PSE450R01W2K3009.msp
PSE450R01W2K3010.msp
PSE450R01W2K3029.msp
PSE450R01W2K3033.msp
PSE450R01W2K3036.msp
PSE450R01W2K3042.msp

PSE450R01W2K3032.msp -  Limited Release hotfix

These hotfixes were generally deploying well to all ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Wednesday, April 16, 2008 7:12:32 AM

Well sort of an answer anyway...

The Technical Marketing team (isn't that a oxymoron?) from Citrix and Microsoft recently got together and published a 14 page PDF (what no XPS?) where they've compared the technical features of a Server 2003 TS, Server 2008 TS, and Citrix implementation.  While I personally think that both teams have been biased in certain areas of the document, it is a good general comparison of the features between the two products.

Click here to read the Citrix blog entry that links to the pdf.

By Shawn Bass on Thursday, April 03, 2008 9:18:06 AM

On April 1st, 2008  Brian Madden had posted up an April Fool's day joke in the form of a blog entry describing how some new Australian firm had developed technology that would allow you to suspend a session running on a Terminal Server and take it offline in the form of VDI on a laptop.  While some people initially commented that they wanted more info about this, etc.  it became clear in the comments that people eventually realized that this technology doesn't exist.

Brian later confirmed that it was truly a joke, but then questions why some of this is not possible.  What I'm going to do in this blog entry is discuss the reasons behind why this technology isn't possible.
Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Thursday, March 27, 2008 7:13:00 AM

It's no secret that Citrix is planning on moving large parts of the Citrix farm configuration into Group Policy.  One of the many reasons for doing this is that you could build a new server, drop it into an OU, and have it preconfigured for use.  While this group policy based farm configuration won't be coming for a year or two, there's some important things that Juliano has discussed in a blog entry with respect to how you get from IMA-based farm/server config to Group Policy based farm/server config.

Essentially what Citrix is planning on doing is creating a Migration Utility that would read the farm information from your current PS 4.5 environment, export the entire thing to an XML file (which you could then edit to make minor modifications and then import it into the new XenApp environment that is Group Policy based.  While I applaud Citrix's thoughts in this manner, I also feel like this type of utility is about 7 years overdue. If a farm migration ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, March 18, 2008 2:57:09 PM

I just noticed on Frameworkx.com that Gus and Rich have officially joined Citrix Systems as Technology Evangelists.  This isn't entirely surprising as both of them worked for Citrix in previous lives, but what is interesting is the timing.  Citrix has recently lost several of their Citrix Technology Professional (CTP) members.  One wonders if this isn't some tit for tat with Provision/Quest...  Of course with Gus gone, there goes another CTP.  Don't worry Gus, I'll hold down the fort for ya!

See this blog entry on Frameworkx for the details.

I know both Gus and Rich very well and I wish both of them the best of luck with Citrix.

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, March 04, 2008 3:43:38 PM

I'm at a client side right now working on a large SoftGrid implementation project. I'm going through the motions sequencing applications when I came across one application from Reuters named StockVal. While I initially figured that this would be a slam dunk sequencing process, I discovered that it was anything but that. You see it's become apparent to me that application virtualization doesn't actually save you from your own stupidity. What do I mean by this? I mean that one of the biggest challenges with traditional software packaging is that packagers do stupid things. What kind of stupid things?  Well here's some that I've personally solved over the last year:

1) Packager snapshots MDAC 2.5 RTM version registry key (the Data Access version key) and distributes said package to over 3,000 desktops. Those desktops that attempt to install anything that requires MDAC 2.7+ fail as they are stating that the machine needs MDAC 2.7. Well XP doesn't come with MDAC ... Read More »