By Shawn Bass on Wednesday, September 26, 2007 7:12:49 AM

Michael Burke has posted part 3 of 4 in his series on troubleshooting Terminal Server licensing.  This entire series is a great read and reference to hang on to.

This topic is on:

• Corrupt license databases
• Activation issues
• Problems adding CALs

Read the full article here.

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, September 25, 2007 9:59:49 AM

Since server hangs is an often reported issue on Terminal Server environments due to high resource depletion, I thought it would be best to post this blog entry under the SBC blog even though it largely applies to all Windows Server environments.  The Windows Server Performance Team blogged about methods to troubleshoot server hangs today and it boils down to these steps:

1. Is this a hard or soft hang?  If this is a hard hang, then the odds are that there is an underlying hardware issue, so contact your hardware vendor.
2. Check the Event logs for any events in the System Log at the time of the hang.  In the case of Pool Depletion, you will see Event ID's 2019 or 2020 with the Event Source being SRV
3. Launch Performance Monitor and check the starting value for Free System PTE's under the Memory object.  If a system is bootin ... Read More »
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By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, September 25, 2007 9:54:22 AM

Michel Roth has written a nice article about tuning file server performance.  The Windows Performance Team has recently blogged about settings that can be tuned for Windows Explorer to reduce the amount of SMB traffic generated.  These would be great settings to apply to a Terminal Server environment since you have a lot of instances of Windows Explorer or File Open/Save dialogs running that could create a lot of SMB traffic.

Some of the suggested optimizations would disable the following Windows Explorer behaviors:

• Searches for Desktop.ini files used for folder customization
• Periodic refreshes of folder contents
• Searches for suppo ... Read More »
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By Shawn Bass on Friday, September 21, 2007 9:47:46 AM

Charles Aunger pointed me to a recently published KB article on Citrix's website that relates to best practices in profiling and delivering applications using their Streaming Server technology.  While much of the info in this article is common sense, it's a nice refresher.

By Shawn Bass on Thursday, September 20, 2007 8:38:54 PM

In a previous blog entry I linked to a blog entry from Helge Klein where he tested the bandwidth impact of enabling ClearType over RDP.  At the time, it appeared that ClearType was responsible for a double in bandwidth requirements.  In conducting further testing, it appears that 32-bit color depth with font smoothing enabled causes the greatest increase in bandwidth consumption (a factor of 6).  Read the updated article here.

By Shawn Bass on Thursday, September 20, 2007 8:25:25 PM

While Citrix stated they were moving away from Feature Packs, they've released Feature Pack 1 for Presentation Server 4.5.  Michel Roth of Thincomputing.net has a nice review of the primary features included.

By Shawn Bass on Thursday, September 20, 2007 8:06:59 PM

The Terminal Services Team Blog has a great blog entry published recently where they describe the support that has been added for dynamic virtual channel drivers within RDP.  Most of us are aware that virtual channels exist within Terminal Services and Citrix ICA to allow for the exchange of information between server and client such as clipboard contents, file transfer, etc.  Those virtual channels are statically defined by the protocol and are moderately difficult to implement.  The blog entry posted illustrates the process for creating a dynamic virtual channel driver that is implemented as a plugin server side that allows to a content menu to be added to send a file to the TS Client's Desktop.  Personally I think this feature would be HUGE as file transfer to the client network is one of the biggest complaints from a useability perspective.  Hopefully C ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Monday, September 03, 2007 12:12:42 PM

Wilco van Bragt has a fantastic whitepaper on his website that details the steps necessary to utilize Citrix Presentation Server within an Ardence OS Streaming environment.  I personally have not used Ardence at any customer sites, but it's definitely something in the queue of things to get up to speed on.  I highly recommend reading this whitepaper.

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, August 21, 2007 10:23:07 AM

Aaron Parker has two very interesting blog entries on automating the creation of Citrix Administrator accounts using VBScript.  The first part of the article focuses on using MFCOM to read the permissions of the admin accounts as well as walking the folder structure of the management console.  The second part of the article is the complete code for adding the new admin account and setting the necessary permissions at each folder within the management console.  I recommend  checking them out if you're into automating your Citrix management tasks.

By Shawn Bass on Monday, August 20, 2007 11:16:35 AM

Helge Klein (from sepago) has an interesting blog entry on the bandwidth usage of ClearType font smoothing and it's impact on RDP bandwidth consumed.  I'd recommend a read of the entire article, but to summarize it appears that enabling ClearType would impose upwards of a 300% increase in bandwidth utilization.  YUCK!