Remko Weijnen's Blog (Remko's Blog)

About Virtualization, VDI, SBC, Application Compatibility and anything else I feel like

Archive for November, 2009

I never liked the new eventviewer that was introduced with Windows Vista. If you want to have the old eventviewer back (you can use the old and new one together) you need to follow the following steps:

  1. Open a command prompt as Adminstrator.
  2. Type Regsvr32 els.dll (if you get error code 0x80070005 then you didn’t run as Administrator).
  3. Start mmc.exe and goto File | Add/Remove Snapin.
  4. From the available Snapins choose “Classic Event Viewer”.
  5. Right-Click Classic Event Viewer under Console Root and select New Window from Here.
  6. Choose Customize from the View menu.
  7. Deselect the Action Pane and Click OK
  8. Now save the file with a name of your choice eg EventVwrC.msc.

It should look like this:

EventVwrC

Doubleclicking an Event feels familiar as well:

EventProps

Windows Vista introduced the Command Bar in Explorer which is sometimes also referred to as the Folder Band or the Task Band. The Command Bar is of course also present in Windows 7 and Server 2008 (R2).

CommandBar

This Command Bar shows possible tasks or actions depending on the active folder. I wanted to remove the “Uninstall or change a program” (in Dutch this is called “Een programma verwijderen of wijzigen”) button from the Computer view:

CommandBarButton

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I needed to do a mass password change on imported accounts and decided to do this with Powershell. For some reason (maybe because I am using PowerShell 2.0) I got an unexpected error when using the Password property or the SetPassword method (RandomPassword is a function I wrote that generates Random passwords the meet the Complexity Requirements):

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  • 2 Comments
  • Filed under: PowerShell
  • I noticed that XenApp 5 Feature Pack comes with a new version of the Web Interface (5.2) (it is also available as standalone download). The parameters to install it in silent mode have changed but there’s no documentation at all on the Citrix Site:

    WIDocs

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  • 2 Comments
  • Filed under: Altiris, Citrix
  • Save Explorer settings without Logging off

    This is more a note to self because I always forget. Explorer holds all it’s settings in memory so if you change a settings through the GUI (like in Folder Options) you cannot use a tool like Process Monitor to see what the corresponding registry entry is.

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    I needed to add a printer connection to a Citrix server but the problem was that this printer had a buggy driver. I wanted to use an alternative driver such as the Citrx Universal Printer driver but on Terminal Server you might want to use the Terminal Services Easy Print driver.

    So I decided to make something that could be used in both situations, the result is a small commandline tool called AddPrinter2 (sorry I am not good in finding original names).

    It takes 2 parameters: the printername as unc path and the driver name. An example would be:

    AddPrinter2 “\\server\printer” “Citrix Universal Printer”.

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    The case of the Unattended Install

    I needed to do an unattended install of an application (in this case Exact Globe 2003) on Citrix. In this case the application provides a special executable, WSetup.exe for an unattended install.

    WSetup takes several parameters, the most important ones are:

    /I: Installation Path
    /S: Install Type
    /IM: Installation Mode

    So this appeared to be an easy task, however when testing the Deployment the /I parameter seemed to be ignored and the whole thing was installed in C:\Program Files.

    I analyzed what WSetup.exe does with my favorite tool, Ida Pro and at first all seemed ok. WSetup determines the default location of the Program Files Directory by reading the ProgramFilesDir registry key (which is of course C:\Program Files).

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  • 1 Comment
  • Filed under: Uncategorized
  • When you uninstall Exchange 2007 you need to remove all Mailbox- and Public Folder databases. If you try to remove the Public Folder Database this will fail because there are replicas of the system folders in the Public Folder database. I didn’t find a way to remove these replicas from the Exchange Management GUI but it can be done with the following Powershell Code:

    Get-PublicFolder -Server <exchange server> “\” -Recurse -ResultSize:Unlimited | Remove-PublicFolder -Server <exchange server> -Recurse -ErrorAction:SilentlyContinue
    Get-PublicFolder -Server <exchange server> “\Non_Ipm_Subtree” -Recurse -ResultSize:Unlimited | Remove-PublicFolder -Server <exchange server> -Recurse -ErrorAction:SilentlyContinue
    Get-PublicFolder -Server <exchange server> “\Non_Ipm_Subtree” -Recurse -ResultSize:Unlimited | Remove-PublicFolder -Server <exchange server> -Recurse -ErrorAction:SilentlyContinue

    (change <exchange server> to the name of your Exchange Server)

    Small LaunchRDP Update

    For a long time now people have asked for a version of LaunchRDP that includes the Connection Bar. The original version was originally written for a very specific purpose and I never anticipated so many people would want to use it. But it seems that a lot of people like the Connection Bar (I hate it, especially with sessions in sessions, so that’s why I am using RDPWithLocalTaskbar).

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    A few days ago I noticed that an unattended installation of Citrix XenApp 5 was installing very slowly. When I looked at the various jobs and their installation time in the (Altiris) Deployment Server I saw that it was the Citrix Access Management Console that took almost 45 minutes to install:

    AMInstallation

    It was clear that this wasn’t normal since the install job is taking installing OS components like IIS and all subcomponents, activating Application Server and reboot in around 9 minutes. The installation of Citrix XenApp itsself takes only 14 minutes.

    I searched with Google and one of the first links was this knowledge base article from Citrix: Slow Access Management Console Installation on XenApp 5.0. The article clearly describes that the delay is occurred by failing checks for Publisher’s and Server Certificate Revocation (because there’s no Internet Connection) and suggests to turn these checks off. Indeed my servers do not have a direct internet connection so the cause and solution were clear.

    And actually I had seen similar issues before in other (non Citrix) installations, some examples are Exchange 2007 (here and here) and SQL Server 2008 (the SQL Installer actually checks if there’s an internet connection in the prerequisites check).

    The suggested, manual way, of turning of these checks is to clear the following checkboxes in Internet Explorer’s advanced settings Dialog:

    IECertificateRevocation

    But since I had to do this on many servers I decided it would be better to do it with a little VBS script.

    (more…)

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