Hanging out here in sunny 80 degree Orlando today at the Citrix CSEIT. I took a lot of pictures, seemed like no one else was and asked the probing questions as I always do. It took me til after the conference was over though to figure out why my newfangled camera was blurring all the images, a total reset was in order. Rest of them ought to come out great.. Click on the Picture below to view the entire web album.
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At any rate there were 6 breakout sessions today and I attended 4 of them. I skipped the one on printing and saw Jeff Pitschs at Briforum, I instead took the time to to write this before I head off to downtown Disney.
The first session I attended was given by Kapildev Ramlal and Tim Card of Citrix. This one was on IMA Internals.
There was lots of good stuff here and the guys did a good job keeping the audience interested. They got down to the nitty gritty of the Citrix Local host cache (LHC)and pointed out a command I had not heard of before called DSMAINT VERIFYLHC /AUTOREPAIR and a utility called LHCSizer which counts the number of records in the LHC.
Want to see the tables in the Citrix datastore (ds) type in queryds /tables They noted the queryds command is case sensitive and is an issue where most admins don't know this. They pointed out the dscheck /clean command to detect and correct data store errors (careful with this command though)
One issue they ran over was when the IMA service fails to start. One solution was to make sure that the ipsec service is enable.
Citrix has released an IMA timeout fix for PS4 it is PSE400W2K3009 which is part of W2k3R02. The guys has so much to present that they ran out of time and did not get to the part of the presentation on the Medevac tool chich is a utility to simulate ica client browsing to test the XML services, ima and RPC functionality. It would of been good to hear this as I have heard a lot about this tool but never played with it.
Next Elisabeth Teixeira and Jamie Baker did a presentation on Citrix Application Isolation Environments. (AIE) To their merit the hit the key points but it is such a convuloted and difficult thing to understand for such a simple idea. (does that make any sense?) I really don't care how it all works... I just want an easy way to do it! Give me a wizard for my app. Ask me in a wizard how it normally runs...what it did when I tried to publish it regular way and then fix the problem and publish it for me so it works. It is just too convoluted and given the choice I would just set up a separate citrix vm for just that app and publish it on that single server and be done with it. I dont have the time to research and figure out what every app I publish does or how it works... I just want to do it. Will we ever get there? Anyways I think this might of gone into a little bit too much technical content for the crowd...they did know their stuff though.
Vishal Ganeriwala and Merdardus Clont presented on the MFCOM and WI SDK (isn't it called the CTXCOM or something like that now?)
Anyways they showed some good basic things you can do with these tools and how you could for example customize your WI site... I have a much easier way though and it is called use word and save as html to edit the include files. I'll give them an A- for effort though.
I skipped Jamie Baker and Nicholas Vasile of Citrix presentation on printing. I am tired of hearing of printing problems. I really haven't had any since I switched to CPS 4... it is basically fixed if you set your systems up correctly. Besides after 7 years of iforums with printing presentations and how it works I just couldn't sit through another. Sorry guys.. I am sure the newbs got a lot out of it though.
Christian Paller gave an interesting presentation following up about CTX106727 troubleshooting guide they started. Now Citrix has release CTX107572 http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX107572&printable=true the Troubleshooting tools for Citrix Environments document
Citrix has hit a homerun with this one which is a single point of reference for all important troubleshooting tools for citrix from around the web.
The idea is to create a single KB article that summarizes the sources and what you would use them for.
I was dismayed that the Thin list and its archives(http://www.freelists.org/list/thin ) was not reccomended as a resource I have been posting a download pick of the week on it for 9 years+ running now and it is a great resource a nd tool for getting answers. In fact I am surprised when I do a google search for an issue if a post from the Thin list is not in the top ten results. : ) It is that good of a resource.
And of course there is my new dowloads site at http://www.thinhelp.com/ and all of the old http://thin.net/ utilities are still out there on the msterminalservices.org site and the ones that aren't have been sent to doug for posting at dabcc. Ok off my soapbox about me... I did suggest though that a link to the above article be posted prominently on the dowloads page at Mycitrix.com (that is if you can find the new downloads page, they had to make a video of where they are now with the new version of mycitrix but that is another story. I give 2 snaps and kudos to Chris and to Citrix for acknowledging that there are other great utilities out in the world (most of them free) that can help solve issues with their product. It was a great presentation.
Jeff Pitsch's presentation on Session Security was pretty much the same he gave at Briforum this past year You can see the video of it over on Brians site at http://www.brianmadden.com/content/content.asp?ID=517
So that's it for day one on the presentation server side of things for CSEIT. I'll blog about day 2 tommorow. My presentation is the last of the group. I have been told the presentations will be posted in the Citrix KB. I'll send along a link when they are.
Have a good one...
Jim
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