Download Pick: PowerGui - A graphical user interface and script editor for PowerShell.

Hello All,
Here is a great FREE utility to get you started learning and using Windows Powershell. The utility is called PowerGui and it is an extensible graphical administrative console and IDE for managing systems based on Windows PowerShell.

What is really cool is that PowerGui has built a pretty large following and community and already there are many contributions of what they call PowerPacks that are prebuilt consoles for things like Active Directory, Terminal Services, Hyper-V and yes even Citrix!

So here are a few links to get you started:
You can download PowerGUI from here:
http://powergui.org/downloads

Once you download and install PowerGui you can download and add the community created PowerPacks
There is a Terminal Services PowerPack you can get from here:
http://powergui.org/entry.jspa?externalID=2071&categoryID=296
This PowerPack allows basic administration of Termial Servers (view settings, permissions, enable/disable connections), RDP sessions (message, connect to, disconnect) and RDP connections (launch, edit settings).

There is one for the Citrix Console available at this link:
http://www.powergui.org/entry%21default.jspa?categoryID=296&externalID=2033
This is a pretty cool thing, you can logoff specific users, view printer, hotfixes, enable or disable apps and more. It would be excellent start to create a console for your help desk.

And one for Hyper-V here!
http://powergui.org/entry.jspa?externalID=2142&categoryID=290

There is quite a library of Powerpacks in categories such as Active Directory, Exchange, Windows Server, Reporting and more!
You can search through them here:
http://www.powergui.org/kbcategory.jspa?categoryID=21

What is really cool is once you load the power packs there is a tab that lets you see what the powershell script is doing in the background.

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Download Pick: Xenapp Web Interface 5.01 Paint by Number Kit - Pimp My Xenapp

For those of you who have installed Citrix Xenapp Web Interface 5.01 you will find that Citrix has changed a lot of the file structure and made a whole lot more of the interface javascript.

The Xenapp Web interface 5.0 SDK has some instructions in it on how to make some changes and do things but unless you are a developer or programmer it reads like a knitting instruction manual looks like to an auto mechanic.

Anyhow Citrix has offered a Paint by Number kit on their Pimp my Xenapp site.
Check it out here:

http://community.citrix.com/display/xa/PimpMyXenApp

When I started playing around trying to figure out where things are I realizedthat the WI Access management console makes most all of its changes in the WebInterface.conf file located in:
C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\Citrix\AccessPlatform\conf\WebInterface.conf

I like the black interface and really the only thing I wanted to do is just put a few links across the top of apps screen of the web inteface. So here is a brief tutorial of how I did it.
Navigate to the above conf directory and make a backup copy of the Webinterface.conf file. Right click on the file and choose edit or open and open the file in Notepad. Go to edit in Notepad choose find and put in Appwelcome.
It will take you to the following line:

AppWelcomeMessage_en=

Now all you need to do is write some html code like in the below text box to include your links and add it after the = sign after AppWelcome message

<b><a href="https://www.adp.com" target="new">eTime Timecard</a> <a href="http://www.cnn.com" target="new">Library Intranet</a> <a href="http://www.cuyahogalibrary.org" target="new">Library Home Page</a></b>

Save the file and you should be done.
The above code would give you three links across the to of the apps page. The "nbsp " will put a space between the links. You will want to add the target="new" tag at the end of your url to make the links open in a new window or they will open in the same window and close your web interface. If you have workspace control enabled that will also close all of your users open apps!
Anyways here is what the finished product across the top would look like.
eTime Timecard Library Intranet Library Home Page

No neeed to stop and restart IIS after editing the Webinterface.conf file just a refresh of your apps page you can see the changes.

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My upgrade of Citrix Presentation Server Web Interface 4.5 to Xenapp Web Interface 5.01

Hi All,
Just wanted to pass along my experience today of upgrading our external Citrix web interface from Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 to XenApp 5.01.

For the most part I was pleasantly suprised with the ease of it and how well it went. I am still figuring out some of the new file structures and customizations but I will pass those tidbits along as I figure them out.
I started by downloading the Citrix Xenapp 5.01 Web interface file from Mycitrix.com which is buried under Xenapp 5 server on the Citrix Site. You will need a mycitrix.com login in order to download the free Web Interface 5.01 file. You can try this link after you login:
http://www.citrix.com/English/SS/downloads/details.asp?downloadID=1681219&productID=-1
I then made a backup copy of my program files\citrix folder and my Inetpub\www folder just in case things went terribly wrong.

Needless to say the documentation for 5.1 was rather lacking. There was a paragraph in the XA 5 admin guide saying you could upgrade from 4.5 to 5 but good luck finding anything else out there. So I gave it a whirl, I closed all apps on the server stopped the antivirus and my WI website in IIS and ran the WI 5.01 executable. It immediately crapped out because it did not find the Xenapp 5.01 console installed on the server. So I had to go back out to MyCitrix and find the Web Interface Console installation files.

After some searching I finally pegged them down. I downloaded and had to unzip them to run the executable. It was called the Web Interface 5.01 Console Extension on the web site. I found it at
http://www.citrix.com/English/SS/downloads/details.asp?downloadId=1681221&productId=186

I ran the Console installation, nexted through it with defaults and all seemed well.

Next I ran the WI installation executable. I chose defaults on all that and nexted through the prompts. Went back to IIS restarted my website and restarted my antivirus and jumped on another machine to see how it looked. Well WI came up and it is a simple black login screen. So I ran the WI console and went through the choices, played around a little bit and made some modifications. This version of WI doesn't use the include files in the same way as 4.5 and has a little bit different directory structure but the new version of the console setup for the website does allow for some additional configurations of color and html links in it. This weekend I will poke around the Web Interface 5.01 SDK that was recently released on the Citrix Site to see what I need to do to get my headers and footers back and pretty it up, but the site is running just fine.

It was an easy upgrade, no problems except for the console surprise. WI 5 seems to load the apps faster and I tested it out on my Tmobile dash to see if it detects the mobile version and it indeed does. Now I just got to get the ICA client working on my dash and I can have my office with me in my pocket wherever I go!

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New Windows IT Pro ITTV Video Using TS Easy Print to Redirect Printer In Terminal Services

In the latest edition of Windows IT Pro magazine newsletter one item caught my eye. The group is creating a video site for IT Pros called ITTV. IT Pros can upload their IT related videos to the site ala YouTube.

One video I came across that might interest some here is one by John Savill on how to use Easy Print to redirect a printer in Terminal Services.
http://www.ittv.net/VideoPlayer/tabid/57/VideoId/215/Using-TS-Easy-Print-To-Redirect-Printers-In-Terminal-Services.aspx

One thing that would be useful and that is currently lacking is a link to embed videos in blogs. Hopefully that will come.

The site is having a video contest called "If I ran Microsoft" encouraging you to upload a video of yourself saying what you would do if you ran Microsoft. Lets see, Fix Vista, Fix Vista, Fix Vista....lol

Enter your video here:
http://www.ittv.net/Contest/tabid/242/Default.aspx

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Microsoft to rename Terminal Services to Windows Server Remote Desktop Services

In the latest Windows Server Blog they announced that Windows Terminal Services will be renamed to Windows Server Remote Desktop Services. It appears the change will take place with the R2 release of Windows Server 2008
http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/archive/2008/10/30/TechEd-EMEA_3A00_-Terminal-Services-renamed-Remote-Desktop-Services.aspx

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Download Pick: Bayden Slickrun

If you are like me when I am on my PC I like to use shortcuts and get things done as quickly as possible with the least amount of typing. I was searching on some Vista command line commands and happened across a slick.. (literally) FREE program called SlickRun by a company called Bayden Systems.

What SlickRun does is put a small command box above the clock on your system try you can type commands into. The box can be moved anywhere on your screen. While it may not look like much at first, SlickRun is a powerful little free tool worth having a go around with. After you download and install Slickrun you will see a box like the below image:

The power of SlickRun comes in with a feature they call Magic Words. Magic Words allow you to turn any common word into a command that will run a program when you type it into SlickRun command window. So for example you could set up Outlook email to come up if you just typed Mail into Slickrun. Or Internet Explorer to come up if you just typed IE. You can also type create Magic Words for full website urls so say for example you wanted to go to FoxNews web site you could put the url to it into SlickRun and assign the word Fox to it. Typing in Fox would bring up an IE (or FireFox or whatever browser you want of choice) window with the Fox news website.

Say you want to make a quick Magic Word for active directory users and computers. Just pick your magic word, I used ADU and add in the shortcut to the AD users control panel into the setup (%SystemRoot%\system32\dsa.msc), save it and off you go! Typing ADU into the SlickRun command line immediately brings it up!!

One thing I did not like about Slickrun was the sounds it made. There was no choice in the program to disable the sounds but I quickly corrected that problem by going to the program files\SlickRun folder and renaming the 3 .wav files to something else. No more sounds!

You can download the latest version and read more about SlickRun at the following URL: http://www.bayden.com/SlickRun/

While on the Bayden site you will definitely want to check out the many other free utilities they offer at http://www.bayden.com/Other/

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Fixing Applications in Vista when you use Roaming or Mandatory Profiles

Windows Vista uses a new directory structure in the users profile for application data. Instead of the folder being called Application Data as in Windows 2000 - Windows XP Microsoft renamed it AppData and created a redirect shortcut to it. (and the profiles are under Users instead of Documents and Settings of course) To further confuse things Microsoft created 3 subfolders under AppData called Local, Roaming and LocalLow.

The confusion and problems arise with roaming and mandatory profiles when you install an application and it puts its data in the LocalLow folder. You see the LocalLow folder can NEVER roam! You can't redirect it either! This was Microsofts way of speeding up profile loading but it created a big headache for system admins. Yes the application data in the locallow folder may have a lot of files and slow down profile loading but in order for a user to move from machine to machine you sorta kinda need them. Duh!

Our problem was with ADP Etime. It used an older version of Java and put the Jar Files into the Locallow folder. If you use a mandatory profile users would have to download the Jar files at every login to the etime app and would have to wait 10 minutes each time for them to download from ADP. (note this doesn't happen for local users because their profile doesn't get overwritten and the locallow folder and its contents remain on the workstation.)
Further if you moved from PC to PC you would have to download the adp Jar files every time you logged in. I came up with the idea to copy the Java Jar files out to a folder on the users hard disk of their workstation and then use robocopy to copy the Jar files into the locallow folder when the user logged in.

This problem is not specific to Adp Etime or Jav either, it happens with flash, quicktime and all sorts of other Internet Explorer Plug Ins!

Anyways I copied the etime Jar files to a folder called Sun on the users C: drive of their workstation and then put the following robocopy command in a text file and saved it as a .cmd file. I placed the .cmd file in the users startup folder of their profile.

robocopy c:\sun "C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Locallow\sun" /e

(note command should all be on one line)


This one copies the SUN folder I put in the C: drive to the users locallow folder creating the sun directory and all subdirectories as needed.

You could do this from a network drive using a UNC

robocopy \\Fileserver\sun "C:\Users\library2\AppData\Locallow\sun" /e

(note command should all be on one line)
This command would copy the SUN folder from the Fileserver onto the workstation. Note the user MUST have access to the share on the file server though.

Microsoft actually did something right by making the Robocopy command native in Windows Vista! You don't have to go out looking for it or download it.

It is a simple work around I know but a necessary one if you want to use roaming or mandatory profiles on Windows VIsta and maintain downloaded JAR files or browser plugin installations across workstations. All you need do is substitute the Sun folder in the above command with the folders you need to replicate like Quicktime and Adobe and put those folders in an accesible place.

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