Remko Weijnen's Blog (Remko's Blog)

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

Archive for the ‘Citrix’ Category

Where to download TraceView

TraceView IconVarious Citrix knowledge base articles refer to a tool called TraceView.exe to view the output of diagnostic traces.

CTX106233 describes where to download traceview but this article is outdated because it describes an older version of the DDK (the Windows Driver Development).

The current DDK version (7.1.0) can be downloaded here and has the filename “GRMWDK_EN_7600_1.ISO”.

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  • Filed under: Citrix
  • Session freeze when starting Excel

    Environment
    Windows 2003 Enterprise (32 bit), Citrix XenApp 5, RES Workspace Manager 2011, McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.7.0i.

    Problem
    When a opening an Excel workbook from Sharepoint the whole session freezes.

    I asked the user to open an Excel workbook from Sharepoint and I noticed the following popup:

    Some files can harm your computer. If the file information looks suspicious or you do not fully trust the source, do not open the file | You are opening the following file: | File name: My Workbook.xls | From: Sharepoint

    So my first thought was that the user somehow clicked this message to the background and IE was waiting for a response.

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    Scripting Citrix Online Plugin Settings

    The Citrix Online Plugin has a number of settings that can be changed. This includes things as Window Size and Color Depth:

    Session Options | Window size | Default | Full Screen | Requested Color Quality

    In my case I wanted to preset the Window size to Full Screen so using Process Monitor I checked where the Online Plugin writes this setting. I Used a Filter that includes only the Online Plugin (PNAMain.exe) and the RegSetValue Operation:

    Filter on Process Name is PNAMain.exe | Operation is RegSetValue

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    Harmony Client crashes upon exit

    Today I was troubleshooting the application “Harmony Client” which crashed upon exiting:

    Toepassingspop-up: HARMONY_Client.exe - Toepassingsfout : De instructie op 0x77e621b6 verwijst naar geheugen op 0x4b750000. Een lees- of schrijfbewerking op het geheugen is mislukt: | The memory could not be read.

    The application had been thinapped and the error only appeared when starting the thinapped version.

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    Bypassing RES/Appsense Application Security

    The video below shows a Proof of Concept of bypassing Application Security in RES Workspace Manager .

    Please note that at this time the code is not publicly available so please don’t ask for it.

    EDIT 2: I added a video that I received from someone who tried my Excel Sheet with AppSense Application Manager.


    EDIT: I wanted to clarify a couple of things regarding this post.

    First of all I would like to explain why I wrote this code and why I choose to test it with RES WM.

    I had the idea about this approach a long time ago but I never got around to actually do it. The main reason was that I needed to convert Delphi code to VBA and especially converting some Windows headers was a lot of work. Then suddenly I noticed that someone had already converted the headers, so I all I had to do was rewrite the code that used it to VBA.

    The choice for RES was made because of two reasons:

    1. If you want to beat something, you want to beat the best and I most certainly consider RES WM to be one of the top products.
    2. At the time I wrote the POC code I had access to an enviroment with RES in it.

    I would like to emphasize that RES contacted me very quickly after publishing this blog. I’ve had contact with RES and they showed a very constructive approach with their primary goal being a fix or guidance for their customers. Hats of to RES taking a constructive approach and I will be working together with RES on this issue.

    Finally I would like to state that I didn’t expect this post to draw this much attention, if I did I would have probably taken another approach.


     

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    Xerox LogoEarlier this week I was asked to investigate a problem with the Xerox Universal Printer Driver. Users complained that printing to a Xerox printer was much slower than printing to an HP printer.

    Excel 2007 IconI received a reference document from a user, a rather complex Excel sheet. When selecting multiple tabs it took almost a minute to generate a print preview in Excel 2007 running on Windows 2003 with XenApp 5.

    I was aware of a bug in the Xerox Universal Driver where almost 9.000 files were copied into the user’s profile directory (I wrote about that in an earlier post). But this seemed to be another problem.

     

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    NTVDM encountered a hard error

    MS-Dos LogoToday I troubleshooted an old DOS application that needed to run on a 32 bit Citrix XenApp Server. The last time I saw an actual DOS application in a production environment must be years ago.

    When starting the application, the WOW subsystem (NTVDM) crashed with the message: “NTVM encountered a hard error.”:

    NTVDM encoutered a hard error

    After spending some time troubleshooting I remembered a similar issue from a few years ago where a DOS application worked fine from the Console but refused to work from an RDP or ICA session.

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    imageI was testing a Script I wrote to launch a Citrix XenApp session using the ICA Client Object. Typical code to do this may look like this:

    On my testmachine it ran nicely but on a customer machine the script failed with the error 2312 “The Citrix online plug-in received a corrupt ICA File. The ICA File has no [ApplicationServer] section“:

    The Citrix online plug-in received a corrupt ICA File. The ICA File has no [ApplicationServer] section

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  • Filed under: Citrix, script
  • I was deploying virtualized Citrix XenApp Servers on HP BL460c G6 servers and somehow the storage (direct attached) responded very slowly.

    I had expected reduced performance (see my earlier post) since I didn’t have the  Battery Backed Write Cache module installed.
    I did order them but had to start deployment before they arrived.

    I did not however expect such an extreme bad performance. Deployment took ages or sometimes failed completely and when logging in to a VM it responded very sluggish.

    Disk Latency

    I looked in the vSphere console what the Disk Latency was. Latency under 10ms is usually considered good while a latency between 10 and 20ms is a potential performance problem.

    I was shocked to notice that the Disk Latency was much higher with peaks toward 2.000 ms (2 seconds!):

    DiskLatency

     

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  • Filed under: Citrix, VMWare
  • The Case of the Citrix Ready Printer Driver

    I had a very interesting issue today on a new Citrix XenApp 5 farm. We went into production yesterday and we noticed a number of issues:

    • Printing in general was slow, especially when a user connects to a printer for the first time.
    • User Profiles were rapidly growing in size (from the expected 1-2 MB to over 40 MB).
    • Logons took much longer then in the testing period (and since we use a Full Screen Desktop the user doesn’t see any progress).
    • Performance monitoring showed CPU spikes in Word, Excel and IE processes.

    I took a look at the profiles first and noticed that the size growth was due to a Xerox subfolder in %APPDATA%:
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