Ozzy Citrix Noobs

Happy Noobing, Keep Noobing, be the best noobs!

Hello All,

Its been a while since I blogged my daily chanllenges within Xenapp. I have been quiet busy with work and *cough* WOW .. haha

Anyways, I thought I would ease into it with a little problem encountered this week with a published version of explorer. Previous the published application was set to load %systemroot%\explorer.exe of a Windows 2003 R2 SP2 server with Xenapp 4.0 R04. Now all of a sudden two weeks ago, user started to complain about explorer taking them to “My Documents” when they launch the published application. (Now I am new to this role and ALWAYS thought, since Windows XP SP2 that Explorer.exe defaults to MY Documents)…. regardless this caused all sorts of issues for users.

After much running around and emails, everyone finally agreed that they wanted a two pane Explorer with the left Pane should “My Computer” expanded in tree view and the right pane, showing all “Drives” in icon view. As shown below.

My Computer

After much googling I published the following ….

%systemroot%\explorer.exe /n, /e, /root,/select,::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}

Someone who is familiar with this will ask why the /select, option is there? as it will work without that… If you don’t add that select, you will not be able to use the “Search” file and folders under explorer if its published via Citrix.. (I have no idea why).

Once our farm is all Presentation Server 4.5, I found it hard to remove dead servers from the farm via AMC.

Occassionally we build VM Citrix servers for testing, and some VMs may be deleted before Citrix Presentation Server is uninstalled. Once this happens, for half of servers we are not able to remove it from AMC.

I tried the following without success:

1. Modify hosts file on the server running AMC. This resulted in a error event ID 4 kerberos duplicate server logged on the server.
2. Run dscheck before removing it from AMC. This did not help.

Eventually, I have to create a new vm with the same server name, install Presentation Server 4.5 and remove it right away to remove it from the farm.

After this I have checked with another 4 dead servers. I was able to delete two of them but not the other two.

We start to play with APM on SolarWinds. APM stands for Application Performance Monitoring, it can poke into Windows services, WMI, scripting etc. It also incorporate the convenience of monitoring protocols and ports.

The following is a brief introduction on how to set up alert in SolarWinds to monitor Citrix XML Service on XML Broker.

1. In Solarwinds homepage, click “Application Performance Monitor” on the Modules row. We are now on the “APM Application Summary” page.

2. Click “APM Settings” to create new Application. Click “AppBuilder” to start the wizard.

3. Take “Citrix XML Broker” as example.
a. Select “Windows Service Monitor” as the first componet, click “Next”;

b. Select “Create a new component monitor” at next step, and click “Next”;

c. Type “ServerName” in the server list (or click browse to choose from the list), and “Citrix Service Account” in the Choose Credential drop down list. Click “Next”;
d. Now we will see all Windows Services for this server listed, including Running and Stopped Windows Service. Select CtxHttp Citrix XML Service, then click “Next”;
e. Now type “Citrix XML Service” as the Monitor Name, accept all default settings, and click “Next”;
f. In “New Application Monitor Template”, type “Citrix XML Broker” and click “Next”;
g. Now select from the tree view list the desired nodes (computers) to be monitored, and click “Next”;
h. Then click “OK, CREATE” button to finish the APM.

4. After setting up the APM, we can jump to the Solarwinds console to set up the alerting:
a. Log on to Solarwinds Console, in All Programs, click “SolarWinds Orion”, Alerting, Reporting, and Mapping, then click Advanced Alert Manager;
b. Click Configure Alerts, the click “New” to create new alert;
c. Type “Citrix XML Broker” in the Name field;
d. Select “Trigger Condition” tab, and add the following simple conditions:
i. Application Name is equal to Citrix XML Broker
ii. Appliation Status is not equal to Up
iii. Node Status is not equal to Down
e. Select “Trigger Actions” tab, click “Add New Action”, choose the “Send an E-mail/Page”, and click “OK”;
f. In the action details fields, type the recipient’s email address in “To” field, change From E-Mail Account details if you need. In the message area, type in the subject and Message content. You can use variables. The SMTP fields are prefilled. In Alert Escalation tab, select appropriate options regarding to alert acknowledgement and alert repeating.
g. Once these finished, you can test the Alert to check the alert format.

One of the pre-requisites of migrating a 4.0 farm to 4.5 is that 4.5 requires .NET 2 to be installed.

To deploy I used the following steps:

Download .NET2 and .NET 2 SP1 from MS

Extract contents of .NET installer to new folder in the temp directory:
c:\>\dotnetfx.exe /T:C:\Temp\dotnet2 /C

Edited netfx.msi with Orca and added the property
REBOOT=ReallySuppress

Copied dotnet2 folder to IM network share

Added package in CMC, point to the netfx.msi as the package to add
Specified the following command line parameter:
USING_EXUIH=1

This option will turn off the UI block that the .NET developers wrote into the .msi. The reason they did this was to ‘encourage’ people to use the install wrapper rather than the internal msi.

Don’t specify /q, this will throw up an error and fail the install, and IM always installs msi files quietly so it is not needed.

Service pack 1 for .NET can then be added also.
For this I created a WSF package with IM packager and pointed it to the install wrapper, as there was no need to suppress reboot with the SP1
Use this line in the WSF file:
ShellExecute=\\’servername’\installationmanager$\dotnet2\dotnetsp1.exe,T,open,%TEMPDIR%,/q,NORMAL

Create a Package Group in IM and add the two packages, chain the install (in the proper order of course) and Bob’s your uncle

Noobs,

Finally worked out why our External WI’s where prompting authentication information on subsequent loading of the same published application. (Hope that makes sense. Little more info below if you are thinking, WTF)

Background Information:

Due to system setup, the Java client is our only means of connection via the Juniper appliances. So we have setup Web Interface 4.2, JICA 9.5.18x with JRE 1.x.x. (as java client depends on the runtime environment installed on client PC, and we have NO control over what version of JRE customer install on there home PC/netcafe’ so on).

Symptoms:

User’s connects to External WI (default client = Java), authenticates and Published Applications are displayed.

i. User select Published Resource #1
ii. Published Resource #1 loads and pass-through all authentication information.
iii. User logs off Published Resource #1 gracefully
iv. User then loads Published Resource #1 again, this time they are prompted with the Windows Authentication.

When the above prompt is displayed the target server records an “event log” for wsxica. Stating the ticket was invalid.

So, what does the above event log mean?

It is stating that the the same WI ticket is been used for a separate instance of the published resource.

So why?

It seems the newer version of JAVA runtime 1.6.x does not clean up or remove the old URL cache, this is what it should be doing after each published resource is launched.

network: Remove cache entry: http://servername/Citrix/Metaframe/site/launch.ica?NFuse_UID=1&NFuse_Application=Citrix.MPS.App.Oceania.Network+Desktop+-+TIP106

Workaround:

1. Disable the Java cache on the client PC.
2. Use older version of JRE 1.5.x (I have not complied a list of compatiably JRE’s yet).

Advanced Diagnostics:

When using the JICA client, it does not store a launch.ica file in the user temp settings like the local client does.

C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Temp\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\

JICA cache the files on the WI itself;

network: Cache entry found [url: http://servername/Citrix/Metaframe/ICAWEB_common/icajava/JICA-coreN.jar, version: null]
network: Remove cache entry: http://servername/Citrix/Metaframe/site/launch.ica?NFuse_UID=1&NFuse_Application=Citrix.MPS.App.Oceania.Network+Desktop+-+TIP106
network: Cache entry not found [url: http://servername/Citrix/Metaframe/site/launch.ica?NFuse_UID=1&NFuse_Application=Citrix.MPS.App.Oceania.Network+Desktop+-+TIP101, version: null]
network: Connecting http://servername/Citrix/Metaframe/site/launch.ica?NFuse_UID=1&NFuse_Application=Citrix.MPS.App.Oceania.Network+Desktop+-+TIP101 with proxy=DIRECT

As you can see above it is stored on the WI were http://servername is the name of our WI.

Ozzy Citrix Noobs

Category: Presentation Server

04/06/09

09:43:49 am Publishing Explorer.exe on Xenapp 4.0

21/01/09

07:42:38 am Remove dead Citrix Servers from the farm

16/12/08

10:41:16 am Practical SolarWinds APM and Citrix

04/06/08

12:08:22 pm Installing .NET 2 + SP1 onto our CPS 4.0 farm

21/05/08

10:37:43 am Java Client - Bug with JRE 1.6.x