Using the Safari Browser with the Citrix Web Interface 4.0

Citrix provide a very helpful article at http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX104367 describing how to customise the Citrix Web Interface 4.0. to support the Mac client on Safari. This works well, but it is not the whole job as when the user logs off and back on again, they will find their client is set back to Java. It also does not present the user client installation prompts in the message centre until they are logged on.

It is fortunately very simple to complete the job. Follow the steps in the Citrix article and then do exactly the same for the following files in the auth folder as you did for the same named files in the site folder: include.cs, embed.cs, install.cs.

Works a treat. Obviously all changes should be tested in a dev environment first and don't forget to read Citrix's disclaimer on the webpage linked above.

Windows Live Mesh

I recieved my invite to Live Mesh today and found it would not install and reported that I should check my network settings: "Installer encountered errors: Please verify your network settings and attempt to reinstall".

Well all was fine with my network settings. I tried setting my locale to US as suggested on some site and ensured that UAC was switched on. I then tried changing my auto proxy configuration script to a hard coded proxy (in IE connection settings) and Live Mesh then installed. So if anyone else sees this error and you are using an automatic configuration script for your proxy, that is why.

Hopefully Microsoft will fix this at some point.

SPSS and Appsense Environment Manager

I am having trouble with SPSS 15 running on Citrix Presentation servers which also has Appsense Environment Manager running. Basically, Environment Manager kills the SPSS processor. I can reproduce this consistently and fix the problem by either disengaging the EM process, removing the EM DLLs or simply removing any applied EM policies.

I have had a call open with Appsense about this for a few weeks. The only suggestion they have made so far is to upgrade to the most recent version. I did this (7.2.227), but it made no difference.

Currently I am trying SPSS 16.0, but not having much luck as our license for SPSS 16.0 is not authorised for use on a terminal server......... Hopefully I will have a call from SPSS soon to establish how I can run this test.

Has anyone seen this issue?

I will keep this post updated, but it looks like we are going to have to switch of Environment Manager on our Citrix servers and live without the good things that it does.

SoftGrid 4.1 - Desktop Refresh Times Out - Error 10000005

I've had issues with SoftGrid today with all Desktop Refreshes failing and no applications launching. Unfortunately this happened while I was rebuilding one of the VAS servers so I wasted a lot of time trying to trouble shoot issues that could have been caused by removing this server.......

The errors I was seeing in the sftlog.txt file when trying to launch applications were:

[03/11/2008 08:00:28.370 AMGR WRN] {hap=1:app=CorelDRAW X3 13.0.0.739:tid=4FC}The SoftGrid Client lost contact with a server and entered disconnected mode.
[03/11/2008 08:00:28.385 JGSW ERR] {hap=1:app=CorelDRAW X3 13.0.0.739:tid=148C:usr=srvrjh}The SoftGrid client could not connect to stream URL 'rtsp://appstreaming.leeds.ac.uk:554/cdrawtst/cdrawtst.sft' (FS status: 1600190A-00000120).
[03/11/2008 08:00:28.385 SWAP ERR] {hap=1:app=CorelDRAW X3 13.0.0.739:tid=148C:usr=srvrjh}The client was unable to connect to a SoftGrid server (rc 1600190A-00000120)
[03/11/2008 08:00:28.432 TRAY ERR] {tid=C88:usr=srvrjh}The SoftGrid Client could not launch CorelDRAW X3 13.0.0.739.

An unexpected error occurred. Please report the following error code to your System Administrator.

Error code: 41112E-1600190A-00000120
This turned out to be nothing to do with the VAS rebuild and was actually associated with the provider policy. It seems that SoftGrid does not use native Windows authentication but instead employs LDAP. In our architecture LDAP often causes issues. We have two domains, a forest root and a child. The child domain is first in the alphabet.

Anyway, we performed some AD upgrade work at the weekend and the one domain controller in the child domain that the VAS servers could contact was offline (in case we needed to revert back the domain). We accepted the fact that users in this domain would not be able to authenticate to the VAS servers during this period, as we have no softgrid users in that domain at present. However what we did not anticipate is that because a group of users from the child domain was defined in the provider policy, SoftGrid would time out trying to contact the domain and it would break all desktop refreshes and all applications (that were not 100% pre-cached).

Microsoft states the issues we were seeing are related database problems, but I would suggest that before you do anything with your databases that you check your provider policy and look for any groups that have not been properly resolved.

ISA 2006 Custom Login Page

I have a couple of custom login pages on ISA 2006 to fit with company branding. This all works well with one problem. When a user enters an incorrect username or password, every now and again the user is dropped back to the default ISA login page. This does not break anything and the user can carry on to login ok, but it looks a bit daft and is very confusing for the end user. I may well be logging this with Microsoft, but I would rather not as it seems like an issue that Microsoft are going to want a lot of information on and because it is very intermittent it could take a lot of time (of which I don't have much). If anyone has found a work around/fix for this I would love to know. Please post to this blog entry. I'll keep it updated if I get anywhere with it.

Softgrid Documentation

Are you looking for the Softgrid 4.1/4.2 Documentation/Softgrid Admin installation guide? Well it is well hidden and oddly not linked from the Softgrid home page and you will be hard pressed to find it on Google. Anyway, it is here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940163

I hope that helps save someone a bit of time hunting around.

Master Site Directory in Sharepoint 2007 Error

I ran into an error when trying to assign a master site directory in MOSS 2007 Central Admin:

This not a valid site directory. Specify a URL to a site that is using the site directory template.

I checked that the URL was valid and that it was pointing to a Directory Site. I even created a new directory site and tried that with no luck.

I worked out that if I set the default public URL to be a simple name like site, instead of site.domain.co.uk, the master site directory page accepts the entry and it all works. However this is no good as we need a proper FQDN as the default public URL (and changing it back after setting the MSD breaks the MSD functionality).

I have a call open with Microsoft through ESCUK about this. This call has been dragging on for a long time and somehow Microsoft have not been able to reproduce the problem.

I'll keep this post updated as and when I hear something back from Microsoft. I would be very interested to hear if anyone else is seeing this problem so I can feed back to Microsoft. Thanks!

07/01/08

Microsoft have finally reproduced this problem and have acknowledged it as a 'possible bug', as such it has been escalated. No news as to a fix yet.

23/01/08

Today I had a call from a developer at Microsoft who has been looking through the code used by the Master Site Functionality and established that it first checks for the existance of the site in the configuration database. This is interesting because apparently if it does not find the exact URL in the config database it will reject it. This means that if you use a different default AAM to the URL you used when creating the web application that hosts your MSD, the lookup will fail. The only way I know of to fix this is to extend your web application and use the URL of your default AAM as the URL for your new IIS site and set this extended web app to use a different zone (i.e. Intranet). The default AAM URL will end up the default AAM for two different zones and will now appear in the configuration database (as it is added by Central Admin when you use it to extend the web app). This is not pretty and I don't advise you go ahead with it in the production environment without taking advice from Microsoft.

Fortunately our default AAM was also the URL that was used to create the original web application used to host the MSD. Therefore the work around above is not appropriate. Back to the drawing board......

Quick thought...... if using NetBios names fixes the problem, what could be happening differently for FQDNs. Perhaps a proxy issue. However I have made sure that our proxy is configured to be disabled for the application pool and service accounts. However each web application's web.config file by default sets the proxy to auto=true. The developer at Microsoft suggested changing this to false for the Central Administration web application. That did the trick! We now have a full functional master site directory. It was a very long time coming for a simple solution, but a good learning experience.

To make this change go to C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\****, where **** is the port number of your Central Admin site. If you are not sure which is the right virtual directory open IIS Admin, right click on the Central Admin site and choose Explore. Right click in the white space to the right and select properties to get the folder and path. Open the web.config and locate the following:

(system.net)
(defaultProxy)
(proxy autoDetect="true")
(/defaultProxy)
(/system.net)

Change to:

(system.net)
(defaultProxy)
(proxy autoDetect="false")
(/defaultProxy)
(/system.net)

You will also need to do this for any web applications that you want to create Site Collections from within a Site Directory page (and make use of the Master Site Directory feature). Hhowever if you do this you may want to use something more like below so that web parts like RSS readers can connect to external feeds.



This adds exceptions for *.domain.local.com and 198.168.*.*

I hope this saves someone a lot of time!