While I'm not entirely sure why they call it brief at just over 70 pages, Citrix has released an update to their Brief Troubleshooting Guide which is IMHO one of the best docs that's come out of Citrix (ok, aside from Jay Tomlin's WI/CSG troubleshooting guides).  It's essentially a workflow guide that can be used when trying to troubleshoot problems in a Citrix environment.  There's also links to all of the admin/troubleshooting guides as well as important KB links for well known problems.  Yesterday's update to the guide adds in information on Netscaler, WANscaler, EdgeSight, and of course Presentation Server 4.5.

Get it here:  CTX106727

Shawn

Wilco van Bragt has a nice article in a series of articles describing alternative products to Citrix Presentation Server.  It's definitely worth reading.

MSTerminalServices.org - Alternatives to Citrix Presentation Server (Part 1)

Shawn

Michael Burke has a nice article up on MSTerminalServices.org on high availability and recovery strategies for TS Licensing Servers.  Hopefully most of you are aware that in the absense of a functional TS Licensing environment, your entire Citrix environment is useless.  To that end, Michael has some great info on how you should design your TS License servers for high availability.

Read the full MSTerminalServices.org article.

Shawn

Citrix has posted information that their acquisition of ThinGenius's load testing product has been productized as Citrix EdgeSight for Load Testing and will be available beginning June 24th, 2007.  This announcement came with the official launch of EdgeSight 4.5.  Pricing for the load testing product is $7500US for 100 virtual users (approximately 1k more than previous pricing under ThinGenius).  Frankly I'm surprised this was launched as quickly as it was.  It seems Citrix is really getting this M&A thing down pat now.

Read the official press release for full details.

Shawn

From this forum thread on the official Citrix Support site, I found a link to a published KB article about the effects of WAN optimization technology on Citrix ICA traffic.  View the whitepaper from Citrix Consulting at the following link:

CTX113505 - FAQ - Truths and Myths of Presentation Server and WAN Optimization

Shawn

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 »