By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, February 26, 2008 8:01:04 AM

Citrix has posted my second technical video this time covering an Introduction to Citrix Streaming and Virtualization (or Isolation as Citrix loves to call it)

As Brian Madden alluded to here and here, Citrix has begun to post more and more technical videos on the XenApp landing page. Within the last week they've posted up the video I created that describes what Citrix Streaming is all about and demonstrates a walk through of creating a streamed application for both a Presentation Server and an ICA Client.  The video is 33 minutes long and gives a good overview of how Streaming works as well as some best practices for streaming your applications.  If you like this video, please post a comment and let me know y ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, February 19, 2008 4:31:02 PM

At a customer site I recently ran into an issue in their PS 4.5 farm (PS 4.5 with HRP1 and AMC 4.6 updates).  The issue manifests itself as certain icons appears a black squares.  The strange part is the icon doesn't look like a black square while you're adding the published app, but the minute you click Finish to save the published application, you see the AMC display it in all of it's blackness like so:

If you then go to view one of these icons in Web Interface, you'll see it show up like this:

Obviously this will result in confusion for the admin as well as frustrated us ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Thursday, February 14, 2008 3:34:50 PM

Citrix finally put out a public hotfix to replace limited release hotfix PSE450R01W2K3021.  The new hotfix PSE450R01W2K3033 fixes several issues with Installation Manager including one that's existed since MetaFrame XP!

Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Thursday, February 14, 2008 8:23:15 AM

Trying to play catch up on the industry as I've been extremely busy lately.  I've come across several blog items from other community guys that I thought were important to share.  All of these items have something to do with Terminal Server scale / performance.

First Michel Roth of ThinComputing.net pointed me to a new free utility from Warren Simondson of Ctrl-Alt-Del Consultancy called TSLoadStat.  This is a command line utililty that measures a few server performance stats and reports them on the command line.  While I don't personally find static measurement tools a good indication of server performance (especially because often these tools induce their own load that artificially makes the server look terribly busy when it's not, it's still worth mentioning here).  You can find the information on TSLoadStat here.

Ne ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Wednesday, February 13, 2008 8:14:58 AM

PubForum is a conference that is put on by Server Based Computing experts as a community gathering / learning experience.  I presented at PubForum 2005 in Nice, France and it was a great experience.  If you plan to be in Dublin during May 9th through 11th, or if you've ever wanted to go to Dublin, I highly recommend this conference.  The conference costs a nominal €175 so it's not very expensive.  Although with the current weak dollar, that's about 1 billion USD LOL.  It's actually around $260-275 US.

More details about the conference including scheduled presenters and topics can be found at the following link.

By Shawn Bass on Sunday, January 20, 2008 1:33:15 PM

Aaron has a great snippet about Adobe Flash 9e breaking Citrix's SpeedFlash acceleration as the ActiveX OCX that Citrix is looking for isn't present in this version.  You probably want to give this blog entry a read before upgrading your Flash components on your servers.

By Shawn Bass on Friday, January 18, 2008 8:02:02 AM

Citrix is beginning a series of webinars to talk about the various SDK components.  I personally think this is very valuable as there's always a need to script some component leveraging the Citrix SDKs.  What a great way to learn about it from the Citrix developers themselves.

The first webinar in the series will on the Virtual Channel SDK and will be held on Friday January 25th 2008.  The webinar will cover the following topics:

• Brief Introduction to ICA protocol
• What is ICA virtual channel?
• Possible uses of custom virtual channels
• Virtual channel components
• Client-Server data exchange
• Introduction to Virtual Channel SDK
• Sample virtual channel demo

Click here to view the information on ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Wednesday, January 16, 2008 10:20:41 AM

Problems installing Office XP on Terminal Server while trying to suppress the installation of Outlook.  This is a confirmed bug in the Office installation routine.

Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, January 15, 2008 11:34:39 AM

What is Project S-Bend?  In it's simplest form, it's a mechanism of notifying a Citrix admin of audit related events that are occuring on your Presentation Server 4.5 farm.  Ok, so what is it really?  It's a Windows Service that Jason wrote that identifies changes to your Configuration Logging database (new in PS4.5) via a SQL Trigger.  When new events are written to the Config Logging database, Jason's windows service will dispatch an email to you letting you know what changed.  Here's a link to where you can read about S-Bend and download it.  And here's a link for basic setup instructions.  Awesome stuff.

By Shawn Bass on Monday, January 14, 2008 10:48:48 AM

I'm not sure how I missed this KB article in December, but Citrix released the tool to recreate the Citrix Print Service user account.  The tool can be downloaded from CTX113554.

Thanks to Thomas Koetzing for the link.