Anyone who has worked with Citrix XenApp (formerly Presentation Server) will know that printers and drivers are a very big part of your farm design and its stability. A print driver that causes instability is a nightmare for Citrix Administrators, now there is a handy tool to help you troubleshoot print driver issues.
The Citrix Print Detective application can be downloaded by clicking the link and is described on the web site as follows.
Print Detective is an information-gathering utility that can be used for troubleshooting problems related to print drivers. It enumerates all drivers from the specified 32-bit Windows computer, including driver-specific information. It can also be used to delete specified print drivers. It also offers logging capabilities and provides a Command Line Interface (CLI).
I can see this being most use for identifying exactly what drivers are installed on your XenApp server. If you’ve not configured your farm(s) to use driver compatibility lists or policies to prevent driver auto install from print servers you can end up with all sorts of drivers installed on your XenApp server. Any of these can cause you stability issues with the print spooler service or even cause a dreaded blue screen of death, nothing like a print driver crashing a server and dumping 50+ Citrix users out of their sessions.
A couple of screenshot of the application can be found below with some details on use, the full instructions on use can be found on the Citrix Print Detective page.
To run the Print Detective software against a remote host , enter the name and click the enumerate button.
Once the drivers are displayed for your local or remote host you can delete a selected driver, (requires administrator privileges)
Now I haven’t used this application in anger myself, as always I’ll keep this in reserve for the next print driver issue in my employers Citrix farm. If anyone has any experience of using this in a real world scenario please feel free to share your experience by leaving a comment or two.
Just been catching up with the latest updates on the new Citrix Reciever for the iPhone, codename Project Braeburn. Citrix seem to now be in full flow with the work on this product, the advanced product team in Sydney, Australia are leading the charge with the development.
The following is an extract from the latest update from Adam Jacques on the 17th of December, sounds like Citrix are working to release this as soon as possible and look to fine tune the new application via real world usage and feedback.
One of the exciting parts of being able to work on this project is the fresh and innovative approach we are taking to get the software in your hands as soon as we can so we can shape future releases. It’s fair to say that the Braeburn team is working schedules like never before and using a much more agile approach to the project’s release.
We are aiming to be very transparent (through the use of this site) so that you know what’s going on with current and future releases of the project.
The way we are approaching the initial release is that we will be getting our version one on to the AppStore as soon as we can so we can get feedback from all of you… our plan is that it will have the core technology which will allow you to manage and make connections to the Citrix Delivery Center and as I mentioned, we are working on a very aggressive schedule and we will be having many regualr updates to the project available on the AppStore as we add additional feature after feature.
But it’s not all about features that you have grown to expect from other the other App Receivers available to connect to Citrix infrastructure, we also have a few tricks up our sleeve that we think you’ll love on your iPhone… let’s just say we are thinking differently about ways to access and interact with your information whilst going mobile with the iPhone.
The initial release is scheduled for sometime in the first half of 2009. The initial release will consist of base functionality with the added extras coming later as App Store updates, the team have indicated they would like feedback to assist in deciding the priority of new features and would like to hear from you on their forum pages. The main website for the Project Braeburn team can be found here, the forums are not up and running yet but they’ve been promised soon.
To keep up to date with all the latest on this release you can find all Citrix blogs relating to the iphone by clicking this link.
As a little teaser here’s a little demo video of a prototype, looks good so far!!
Its been a while since I had a read over the new content on Shannon Ma’s blog. He’s been busy writing articles and in amongst them all, I noticed a little announcement back in late October that I missed completely.
XenAppPrep 2.0 has finally been released! you can download it from the XenApp Developer network site, this page contains all the details on pre-requisites, installing and how to use the XenAppPrep tool. I also found a nice article that Shannon had written about using XenAppPrep when you have Edgesight agents installed on your XenApp servers.
This is very handy and I will be passing this on to a number of people I work with. We had an issue recently when a clone of a production citrix server was taken by a 3rd party for our DR site. All the data that was registered for the production server in the Edgesight database appeared to switch allegiance and re-registered itself in the database against the new server name. Think these articles and this tool will come in handy if we ever look to do any more cloning.
I finally finished my 18 month mobile contract this week and so to celebrate I jumped supplier and moved to O2 in the UK so I could get myself a new 3G Iphone. So today was the first real chance i’d had to sit down and look around at what applications were out there for use with this fantastic device.
One of the first things I went looking for was a Citrix ICA client. I use Citrix as my main way of connecting into work remotely when I’ve got a task to do out of hours, being able to use it on the Iphone therefore would increase my flexibility in that I don’t have to be at home or near an internet connection when I want to do something that can only be done out of hours.
After doing a bit of reading it would appear that Citrix don’t have an Iphone Citrix client yet but they are definately working on one. Chris Fleck’s Iphone blog has been updated recently to state that they will be shipping a “Citrix App Receiver client for the iPhone” sometime in the first half of 2009. Keep your eyes peeled to this blog page for updates and make sure you cast your vote to tell Citrix what you need Citrix on the Iphone for, lets raise the priority on this one. There’s a great little video of what they’ve managed to achieve already on Albert Grandville’s blog site looks pretty sweet. Suppose the only question is going to be in and around interaction with the windows desktop, I don’t think anyone will be writing up any large reports on their Iphone.
Well I finally overcame the Windows certificate issue that occurs with Adobe Air and BlueBear Kodiak. I thought I should reshare this seeing as everyone wants to have a play with this new ESX management tool.
Step 1
Ensure your ESX server has a valid hostname on it’s certificate by connecting to it through a web browser and viewing the certificate. Certificates are usually not a problem with ESX 3.0 or ESX 3.5. ESX 3.5i on the other hand is a completely different story. See my blog post on how to sort this problem out Regenerating SSL Certificates in ESX 3.5i
When logging on to Bluebear Kodiak, don’t make the same mistake I did. Log on with the FQDN name of the ESX host, I was using the shortname which works fine for most things but obviously does not match the certificate that’s been installed. Once you’ve done all that you should have no issues using this great program on a windows machine.
Ever had to take a Citrix server out of the farm? Sure you have, everyone has at some point or another.
This can be achieved in a number of ways. You could stop the server accepting connections but if your server is in a remote datacentre and you don’t have ILO (HP), DRAC (DELL) or RSA (IBM) then you can’t remote desktop on to it to do the maintenance.
You could block ICA Connections in Terminal Services Manager but then what happens to users who are on the server already? Well they’re going to have issues connecting to existing sessions.
My preferred option is to unpublish all the applications from the server the day before the maintenance. This means that the users can still access the applications they’re already connected to and that over time the server will clear down as users log off.
During a recent XenApp deployment project myself and a olleague came up with a script to unpublish all applications on a named server. The Script writes out a note of the unpublished applications to a text file in the same folder as the scripts so that you can run another script to reverse the process after maintenance is complete. This proved invaluable during the project and has been used quite a lot since the farm went into production.
svroffline - Script to unpublish all applications svronline - Script to republish all applications
You can run this from a XenApp server without issue but if you want to run it from your machine you will need the Citrix SDK installed so that your client PC has the MFCOM objects required locally by the script.
Let me know how you get on with this or if you have any questions.
Been having a little look at Shannon Ma’s Citrix web log today and have been reading with interest about XenAppPrep which is a tool that allows you to clone XenApp servers in a nice clean manner. You basically setup your XenServer with all the apps and customisation /fine tuning required, install the XenAppPrep application and run it to remove all machine specific information. Run any other tools such as sysprep and then capture your image using whatever imaging software you usually use.
When the clone comes online the XenAppPrep service starts, reset all the machine specific information and start services such as IMA. You’ve now got a nice clean new XenApp Server without any of the normal hassle associated with cloning a Citrix server.
You can read more about XenAppPrep at the link below and read about Automated Deployment on Shannon’s blog which is linked in the blogroll to the right of this article.
