Just stumbled on a citrix KB suggesting a way to drain users’ sessions from a XenApp Server,

The article is found here: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX119661

And offers creating a load evaluator with “Citrix User Load” rule and set it to 1,

Why not use the following Load Evaluator technique?

Create a Load Evaluator with the “Scheduling” rule and remove all schedules from every day of the week, call the new Evaluator “Drain Mode” and apply it to start draining users from the server you applied the custom load evaluator to, I use it and so far it’s been working like a charm, just make sure the applications have all been published to other server on the farm as well,

Enjoy

That’s where good ol’ Process Monitor from SysInternals Suite comes in…

In Procmon i choose to filter the Internet Explorer PID and i also filter Operation of kind “RegSetValue” then by going to the internet explorer and interacting with the GUI and choosing something like “Don’t show this message again” and choosing it we can see procmon “sniping” the exact key that changed in the registry and the value that was set to reflect the change.

Later i’ve gone and set up the following GPP to apply this change on a per user base,

I feel that this is a good skill to know if you’re going to be dealing with customizing users environment when they are in your territory – the terminal server, and this technique can applied to many scenarios the involve modeling the terminal server environment.

Before i explain my solution, Citrix has posted a solution that is more complex than what i offer here,

the CTX articles are:

http://support. Citrix.com/article/CTX114691

refer to Shawn bass’  great explanation of this issue:

http://www.shawnbass.com/Blogs/tabid/58/EntryId/130/Odd-issue-with-Citrix-hotfix-that-hangs-on-COM-Registration-of-CitrixLogServer-dll.aspx

which led Citrix to create a special MST (MSI Transform file)

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX113639/

This also happened in our environment, the installation stalled and hung, i ran it using msiexec logging and thanks to Shawn’s excellent i had an idea, which eventually made it all much more simpler

I thought “Well, if the problem is the timeout when resolving the SID of “networkservice” account maybe i can time it out…”

I connected  to the using serial port (HP ILO) and.. wait for it..

Disconnected the network cable while it was hung,

I guess that timed out the SID resolve for “networkservice” account and the installation continued successfully,

I have a full verbose log of the successful installation, but i guess you’re more interested in the part that stuck and then continued,

key_component=C:\Program Files\Citrix\System32\CitrixLogServer.dllcomponent_tlb=C:\Program Files\Citrix\System32\CitrixLogServer.tlbcomponent_psdll=component_install_state=3component_action_state=3key_role=__allrole_install_state=3role_action_state=3key_user=networkserviceuser_domain=nt authoritykey_property=Identityproperty_value=nt authority\networkserviceproperty_type_value=6

***this where it hangs, you can’t see it but it was 20 minutes of thinking, surfing & reading about this problem before the next line ;-) **

Property(S): CTX_CDF_MM_ProtectCAT.D4E6CDE7_FAC1_458B_8935_048A9A1DB4A4 = C:\Program Files\Common Files\Citrix\System32\cdfdrv.cat

Looking forward to hear if there’s anything i could have and hearing your experiences with this solution,

Oh and before i forget Thanks Shawn!

IT.NeverEnds…

I’m a real fan of VirtualBox and i use version 3.2.4 on my windows 7 ultimate 64bit,

Today i tried using a usb etoken from Aladdin on my windows XP pro guest and to my surprise it didn’t work,

i looked all over the documentation and tried to filter my usb token, i tried what not and it refused to work,

when performing the command “VBoxManage list usbhost”  i could see all my other usb devices like my usb printer, usb drive etc. and in the filter screen i was offered to filter everything usb But not the etoken,

then it hit me! I recalled that Remote Desktop is possible of mapping smart-cards, printers, drives and other PNP devices, that was exactly what i needed,

I put my evil-genius smile and connected to the guest xp via RDP and saw that the etoken had mapped well and i was able to use it (i previously installed the etoken drivers on the guest of course),

this is how it looks like before i used the RDP workaround

and this is from inside the RDP session:

I think Oracle has a thing or two to learn from Microsoft when it comes to ease of use – especially with peripherals,

and as for this workaround i think this might be useful in more than one cases where one needs to connect a device using usb to a VM,

Goodbye for now, IT.Never.Ends..

How can we know if an application is actually doing something and that it isn’t plainly stuck or frozen?

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had some sort of indicator as to the application’s activity?

Well, a good way I learned to view an application’s activity is using the windows built-in Task Manager,

To do that we will need to open the Task Manager, you can do that by right clicking on windows task bar and choosing “Task Manager”

Next, we go to “Processes” tab and click on “View” button at the top, we then choose “Select Columns…” we will be presented with a selection screen of various processes information available for us to view in the processes tab,

Check the “I/O Reads” and “I/O Writes” and click OK,

Now it’s possible to see if any In (that’s what the “I” stands for in I/O) or Out activity is going on and two new columns will be added and named respectively, the figures show us how many operations a specific process wrote or read and includes file (Hard Drive) and network (the internet or lan) operations.

That way we able to decide if a process might be doing anything before we end it,

To learn more about windows built-in Task Manager head over to Microsoft’s technet article:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc938567.aspx

Goodbye for now, IT.Never.Ends…

I’m sure you’re all aware of the importance of a monthly/yearly maintenance of your hard drive,

In my experience to achieve the best performance from those fragmented hours it’d be wise to follow along the tips for a better performance of your xp machine,

You’ll notice great improvement in performance of application with large file system I/O

After all today biggest bottle-neck in achieving good performance is the speed of storage (Hard Drives)

Preperation (or De-fragmenting more files takes more time)

So make sure you clean unnecessary disk space hogging files,
you can see these places for good “Shift+DEL meat” :

1. Start button > Run… > %temp% > OK > Delete all the files you can there (also try %windir%\Temp)
2. Start > Run > appwiz.cpl (add or remove programs panel) > see if there’s something on the list you recognize as un-needed and > click on the item and choose “Uninstall”
3. Run the disk cleanup utility from Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup
4. Time to empty that ol’ recycle bin!

These steps should clear some files that we don’t want to be De-fragmented, let’s carry on..

Enter the Zone

Next we will Start windows with as less programs as possible,
The reason why we want to do that is to make sure less files are in use and in return are locked to changes made by the defrag process,

Two ways of doing that are:
** browsing the internet is not a recommended action at this point!

1. Using Safe Mode (click F8 when the computer starts until a menu shows up and choose “Safe Mode”
2. Using MSConfig utility from the “Run..” panel, there you can set it to selective startup and un-check all check marks except for “System Services” item, then go into the “Services” tab and check “Hide all Microsoft services” and click the “Disable all” button, click ok and restart into a “cleaner” (processes wise) desktop

De-fragment

1. Start the “Disk Defragmenter”
   Start > Run… > %SystemRoot%\system32\dfrg.msc
2. Choose the volume you wish to defrag and click “Defragment” (it’s usually C:)
3. When done you’ll be shown a report of items the defragmenter was not successful to defrag, View the report to see what files are left to defrag and how many fragments they contain, we will return to this list in the next step

Post-DeFrag actions

Time for some surgical defrag on specific OS or application files

1. Download the single file defrag utility called “Contig“
2. In order to be able to run the utility from any Command Prompt window we will extract the file named Contig.exe to c:\windows\System32
3. Open the report saved in step 3.3 and see what files are left and the number of fragments on each of them
4. This is where experience and knowledge come into place, Say I was experiencing slowness in adobe premiere i would look for files under “c:\program files\Adobe”,
   when you know what files you’re interested in head over to the next step
5. Step into command prompt and use Contig followed by the file’s name and path,
   e.g. Contig C:\Lotus Notes\Data\mail.nsfTip If you’re interested in using contig on multiple files in a folder then use the -s parameter and provide the path to the file followed by *.* (all files) or *. (files of certain extension, like DLLs),

   e.g. contig -s c:\program files\adobe\*.dll

Done? let’s bring things back to normal

1. If you used safe mode to perform the Defrag simply restart your PC, it should load to the normal configuration,
2. If you used the MSConfig utility you should run it again only this time choose
   ”Normal startup” and click on the OK button

   

have any questions or additional tips
then feel free to let us know in your comments!

After much wait (Tried using MSFT new download manager..) I finally obtained a Server 2008 R2 64bit image for evaluation from Microsoft Here

The evaluation as is the commercial product is in 64 bit only and there’s no 32bit version for Server 2008 R2,

Here’s the story of how i achieved it using my computer setup and VirtualBox

Luckily I’m using Sun’s (or should i say Oracle’s) VirtualBox which supports running x64 guests on x32 hosts like

my windows XP professional 32 bit, all you need to do is make sure you have the following:

- 64 bit processor support

- Intel’s Hardware Virtualization (VT-x) support

I have an Intel core 2 duo E6550 on Intel’s G33 motherboard

there’s also an easy way to check if you have these features using a little utility called “Securable” from the great security focused website GRC.com (Intructions,if needed, are over at GRC.com’s page)

VirtualBox is available for download Here

Just in-case you wonder why VirtualBox and not Microsoft’s own Virtual PC/Server or VMware’s Products

it’s because Microsoft’s product doesn’t runing 64bit on 32bit hosts.. and VMware’s is sloooow compared to VirtualBox,

Anyways I’m so glad I will be able to checkout Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services soon,

Wondering if it manages to scale up against Citrix’s XenApp..

Promise to keep you updated on this :-)

Anyone who uses remote desktop from XP to XP knows how difficult it’s for the eyes when the fonts display all pixelized and if your like me you probably hate it,

Well this trick will make life a whole lot easier for your eyes..

1st, a bit of background, back in 2002 when XP was released the team who was in charge of RDP must have thought that having Clear Type enabled while in RDP session will slow the session down,

Now tho LAN networking is much faster and has more throughput so it’s more convenient to have it enabled,

But wait, there’s a catch, where do you enable this? well you can’t. not in the preferences of Remote Desktop.

With a little modification to XP’s registry (Only works if you have XP with Service Pack 3)  you could enjoy Full Clear Type (Font Smoothing) in your remote desktop session,

For starter get your REGEDIT up and running from Start > Run…

2. add the following lines to the registry:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations]
"AllowFontAntiAlias"=dword:00000001

AND

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp]
"AllowFontAntiAlias"=dword:00000001

As the user s4e8 explained over at Dan Farino’s page on CodeProject

"If a session initialed by console, and switch to remote afterward, it use the first one. If it’s initiated by RDP it then uses the second"

Thanks s4e8!

After adding these registry values simply restart the remote computer to enjoy Clear Type Galore!

Know any neat tips and tricks for windows xp? tell us all about it in the comments

I made a collection of my Firefox add-ons, some of them you may have heard of

You can find them all here

Especially useful is the InstaClick add-on for people from a laptop or netbook,

Enjoy,