Jason has done it again and released another tool that probably should have come from Citrix.  Project Mobius is a beta1 release that at the present time is capable of drag-n-drop of published applications from one farm to another.  (PS3 through PS4.5).  A future release will bring the same support for policy objects.  Read up on the Project Mobius Beta1 here.

Shawn

I thought I would share this issue with everyone as it's a pretty odd one.  At a client site of mine that is running Web Interface 3.0, the server group had deployed 2003 SP2 to the Web Interface servers over the weekend.  After this, two Web Interface servers hosting different sites both started displaying the typical "Error: An internal error occurred. Please contact your system administrator." messages.  After disabling the Custom Error handler messages per CTX111722 a more descriptive, but still largely useless error message appeared on these servers.  Here is the message that was displayed:

Server Error in '/Citrix/MetaFrame/default' Application.

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For those who have ever written an MFCOM script, you may find it's a daunting task once you start examining the MFCOM Class.  There's multiple different interfaces depending upon which platform and version of PS that's involved and it's generally confusing to know the relationships of all of the components.  Fred Liu (a.k.a. Dr. SDK) has posted a blog entry explaining why the MFCOM class is so complicated and what Citrix is doing with CPSCOM to make things better.  If you want to get a view at MFCOM, see this class diagram.  Otherwise, continue on here to Dr. SDK's blog entry on CitrixCommunity.com

Shawn

There are several threads on the official Citrix support forums of people who have noticed a variety of strange things in their environment (after migrating to PS 4.5) ranging from increased WAN utilization, to increased CPU utilization for the Winlogon process and XTE service.  The culprit is our old friend the Smart Card hook.  If anyone remembers the joys that smart card redirection caused for 2000 servers with the Update Rollup 1 Patch this will be a painful reminder.  Anyway, Citrix appears to be creating a private hotfix for this at the moment.  In the meanwhile you'll want to disable the smart card hook via the registry entry or via the Terminal Services group policy entry for smart card redirection.  See the following forum threads for more info:

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While viewing a blog entry over at baeke.info, I was directed to this fantastic document from Microsoft that lists the functionality differences between 2003 Server and Longhorn server.  While this covers many things above and beyond the Terminal Services changes, it does have lots of info explaining the new features of Terminal Services that I'm sure you've read about in hundreds of other blog posts (Easy Print, RemoteApp, TS Gateway, etc.)  In addition to the terminal services stuff, there's a wealth of information on the changes to Active Directory, info on the inclusion of Windows Firewall in Longhorn, and good stuff about Server Core (which I personally think is going to be an awesome feature of Longhorn server).  Anyway, download the entire 272 page doc over here ... Read More »

Around June of 2006 I created a video for Citrix that explains how the UPDv3 printing engine works in Presentation Server 4.0.  That video is available on the Presentation Server landing page under Technology Videos.  Brian Madden has also done several videos on farm design, Speedscreen technologies, etc.  I personally think that some of these videos are a great way at getting a better understanding of how these technologies work in a quick 30 minute view versus spending tons of time reading documentation and white papers.  I highly recommend that you check them out.

Here's a link to the Citrix Technology Videos for Presentation Server

Also, I'd love to hear feedback on what other topics that you'd like to see in a Citrix Technology Video?  Would you like to see more information on Streaming Server/Tarpon, Web Interface/Se ... Read More »

Al Solorzano has published an article that provides an overview on how to setup the Configuration Logging feature of Presentation Server 4.5.  Configuration Logging is the new feature that Citrix added that audits all farm changes made via MFCOM (i.e. it covers changes made via the CMC/PSC, ASC/AMC, as well as scripts that utilize MFCOM).  Anyway, Al's got a great article up that covers the step-by-step of how to set it up as well as the basics for creating a report of the Configuration Logging database.

Read the full article here.

Shawn

Per the Terminal Service's team blog, Microsoft has enabled support for revokation of TS Device licensing in Longhorn Terminal Services.  This should come as great news for the 3 people who are actually running 2003 Terminal Services in Per Device mode

Read the complete blog entry here

Shawn

I've blogged previously about the release of the Idokorro Mobile Blackberry client, and at the time I mentioned that there were some instances where you would receive a Terminal Services error that you weren't part of the Remote Desktop users group.  I'm happy to say that Idokorro has released a beta client that fixes this issue.  I don't want to share the download URL that they sent me privately, but you can contact them for a beta URL link to test this.

I'm loving this new way of using Citrix.

Shawn

The Terminal Services team at Microsoft have posted the first in a series of blog entries on what's happening with TS Licensing in the Longhorn timeframe.  Many people know that TS user licensing is not tracked in 2003 Server, and every is fully expecting that to change in Longhorn.  However, the startling piece of this article (for me anyway) was this line:

"Note that in Longhorn, per-user licenses are only tracked and not enforced."

I'm not sure if this is in reference only to the beta product, or if it's the plan for the actual product launch.  I'd be very surprised if per user licensing wasn't enforced, though I'd have to say I'd be very happy if that was the case.  Licensing enforcement sucks!

View the blog entry here.

Shawn