After having just migrated a customer from Web Interface 3.0 + Secure Gateway 2.0 to Web Interface 5.1 / Secure Gateway 3.1.1 I had the unfortunate pleasure of finding a memory leak in Secure Gateway 3.1.1.  After some period of time (hours/days depending on how busy your SG environment is) the private bytes in use by the Secure Gateway service climbs to a point where it stops functioning.  When this happens you're down.  What's worse is that if you're using traditional port monitoring on a hardware load balancer, the SG Service still listens on 443 so your load balancer won't direct users away from the non-functional Secure Gateway host.  About three days ago Citrix pulled the Secure Gateway 3.1.1 download as visible on CTX121012  However that doesn't help me much since my customer was turned up a few days prior to it being pulled UGH!.  Anyway, I'm now in the process of uninstalling SG 3.1.1 and installing 3.1 in it's place (which sucks because 3.1 has a security vulnerability).  Hopefully Citrix will put out a fixed 3.1.1 release and more importantly hopefully they start communicating these types of things through their blog, etc.

...

Read More »

Over the course of the last few years, I taught an Advanced Citrix training class that was originally developed by Brian Madden.  Over those few years, I took the material and updated it, rewrote large parts of it and made it my own.  At the same time, Dr. Benny Tritsch began contributing to the material and was teaching the class in Europe.  After BrianMadden.com was acquired by TechTarget, Brian (and myself and Benny Tritsch) effectively halted those training classes.  This is why the Training URL on Brian's site says "We're working on our 2009 schedule".  Anyway, I've arranged a relationship with a training facility and I intend on giving the training class anywhere from 2-4 times per year (no need to become a career trainer - there's plenty of those out there now).  If you're looking for a training class to really learn how Citrix works, then this is the class for you.  We don't do any of those pointless labs that are in most training cirriculum....

Read More »

So I've got a client that I've been rolling out HRP04 for XenApp 4.5 in order to resolve a nasty conflict between Microsoft App-V and Citrix's Client Drive provider cdm.sys that results in BSODs in certain circumstances when users of App-V applications try to perform I/O to their client drives.  The system BSODs with a Stop 8E.  I've been cautious about rolling out HRP04 because we've found re-introduction of some multimonitor glitches that were quite stable with HRP02 (as long as Post-HRP02 3040/3044 wasn't deployed - can't remember which of those two the seamless problem came from).  Anyway, I've got HRP04 rolled out to about 80% of the farm, but we have one app that was bombing in Seamless mode because the application didn't think that the session had an 800x600 sized display.  What's strange about this issue is that I ran...

Read More »

I'll be giving a session a Pubforum 2009 in Dublin, Ireland on June 5-7 (yes Friday through Sunday, this is a geek conference after all).  I'll be presenting on VDI and where the industry in general is at now that XenDesktop 3.0 has been released.  Stop by and say hello!

Hoff tipped me off to this great audio recording of Larry Ellison speaking on "What the hell is the cloud?". It's an enlightening bit of audio that reflects some of my thoughts on the hype surrounding cloud computing.  Definitely an entertaining listen.

Just stumbled upon this today.  Initially I though this was an extension of the April Fools day joke about Chrome automatically rendering web pages in 3D, but it seems legit.  Checkout the full blog entry here.

There's a pretty sick video demo shown in the blog entry.  Check it out.

There are two things that have slowed investigation of Windows 7 and 64-bit Terminal Services for many Enteprrises. Those two things are App-V not supporting Windows 7 (yes, I know Windows 7 isn't released yet) and the lack of support for 64-bit in App-V. Microsoft has released immediately (for MDOP customers) an App-V 4.5 CU1 release that works on Windows 7. In addition, they've announced that they'll be opening up the TAP for App-V 4.6 which will support 64-bit Windows (TS is the big use case here) in Q1 2009. I happen to have a customer that is running App-V 4.5 right now that is definitely looking forward to both of these things, so it's very exciting news.

A client of mine recently rolled out their upgrade from McAfee 8.0 Enterprise to 8.7 Enterprise.  On the Citrix server environment we had two major application failures that were the result of the McAfee upgrade uninstalling the MS XML 4.0 Parser on the servers.  There were two applications on the production Citrix environment that required the MS XML 4.0 Parser and they both stopped working following the upgrade.  Unfortunately, the issue was not caught in Lab/UAT testing and was only found after McAfee went out to production.  To make matters worse, something went wrong with the deployment mechanism and the McAfee upgrade went to all servers in one blast whereas the server team usually pushes in 2-3 separate sets of server groups.  All of that combined = FAIL

So McAfee is responsible for the outage, right?  WRONG!

What the Mcafee installer was doing was proper behavior.  It had incremented the shared component registry entry for MSXML4.dll when it was installed on the servers.  The shared DLL component...

Read More »

I was recently running some Windows Update patches on one of my client's Server 2003 boxes (they aren't using a patch management solution) when I ran into a strange error that stated the Windows Update site could not be accessed and the error message listed was 0x80070020.  This message did not appear while trying to install the updates, it appeared right after the selection for Express vs Custom.  I chose Custom and it's supposed to query the available patches for the server, but instead I was greeted with error 0x80070020.  In doing some reason on this error I found that it's related to a file locking issue.  Some people on various forums reported issues with BitDefender AntiVirus on Windows XP and Vista as the source of the issue.  While they're not running BitDefender on their server (they run eTrust), it was worth looking into.  I also found KB883825 which also lists Anti-Virus as a potential source of issues for Windows Update.  So I temporarily...

Read More »

I was recently installing VMWare Server 2.0 (the freely available VMware virtualization platform) and I found that after the installation initialized it threw this error message:



In doing a quick bit of research, I discovered that this is some type of an issue with Windows Installer engine with large MSIs.  Essentially Windows Installer is unable to allocate the necessary virtual memory to verify the integrity of the MSI.  The strange part about this issue for me is that this server has 6 GB of RAM and there's absolutely nothing else running on it....Strange eh?

Anyway, MS has a hotfix for this issue.  Download and install KB925336 and you'll be good to go.

 

Read More »