Roberto Alves

Scripting and server based computing

Tag Archives: policy

Easily running commands in all servers/workstations

Sometimes we are diving into so many tools, products, technologies, etc that we forgot simple and old tools that can save the day or at least save a good time. I will give as example the Sysinternals psexec, that is very useful to run remote commands.

Let’s imagine that you need force a policy update in all servers or workstations. May be, your first thought can be:  “I can create a script that reads a file with a list of servers/workstations, after read the file, the script can run processes using a WScript.Shell object. After ran the process in each server the script can get a result and save a file with the task results.” Of course that this script will take some time to write and probably will have some dozens of code lines.

Or, you can do the same task just with one line of command.
Continue reading →

Simple and better solution to redirect local drives in XenApp sessions

ICA or RDP are not the best protocols to copy files between DataCentres and remote workstations. But, some times is very difficult to implement a different solution to provide access to users local files from Citrix XenApp or Terminal Services, and even if the idea was rejected in the design of your environment, one day you will be faced with this problem and may be your easiest and better option will be enable redirection from local drives to remote sessions.

Well, you can select if you want map/redirect floppy disks, cd roms, remote drives or local drives. If you are worried with the impact of this configuration in the logon time of your users, probably you will enable just the redirection for local drives and unfortunatelly you will consider that many users can have more than one local drive and this can affect their logon.
Continue reading →

Is Citrix FastLaunch a good option to improve logon time of Citrix XenApp sessions?

In this month Citrix released a new utility called FastLaunch. This is not a official supported utility or even a tech preview. It is just a very small utility made by IT guys in Citrix to “hold” Citrix sessions, providing to users reconnect their sessions every time, instead to logon again.

This tool was created some time ago and Citrix didn’t made available because they faces a interesting problem caused by the community involvement. Someone shows the utility in a Citrix event, then other one put a video in internet talking about the utility, and a lot of people become to ask for downloads or to Citrix include the utility in XenApp.

But, the “magic” utility is not a dream for almost Citrix administrators pissed off by users complaining about slow logons. In almost cases, this utility can be a major problem, witch means that you need to be very careful before publish to production users.
Continue reading →

Forcing PN Agent address with Group Policies

On last year, with Presentation Server client version 10.x Citrix finally introduced a template .adm to administration of clients configurations through Windows Group Policies. This icaclient.adm template is very useful to ensure to you that all configurations were applied to all users that you want.

With this .adm you can do somethings like:

  • Configure single Sign-On for Web Interface
  • Set other user authentication configurations
  • Force policies of drive mapping, printers, microphone, clipboard, etc
  • Force graphics settings like SpeedScreen Browser Acceleration and SpeedScreen Latency Reduction
  • Simple client version control

*Remember that some configurations will Continue reading →

.ADM with Regional Settings using United Kingdom as default

Is very common find applications that works only with a specific configuration on Control Panel / Regional Settings.  And change this configuration on all users profile can be very big headache, then save these lines below as a .adm file and include on your policy.

Default settings are configured to British standard but you can change the values as you wish. To be easier, you can set all configurations on your Regional Settings and compare the values on HKEY_Current_UserControl PanelInternational on your Registry.

CLASS USER
CATEGORY “Control Panel”
POLICY International
KEYNAME “Control PanelInternational”

Continue reading →