When I started this blog in 2007 (wow that’s almost 10 years ago) I went for a cheap web hoster with a reasonable performance to host it.

In the beginning performance was acceptable but over the years it has degraded and of course user experience standards have changed.

I decided it was time to do something about it so I’ve moved the blog from a shared platform to my own server.

This server is running on optimized flash storage  where most writes are DeDuplicated and never actually hits the flash disks:

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Citrix Receiver and StoreFront error messages are sometimes confusing or lacking details so I decided to make little blog notes about common issues when I see them. So without further ado here’s #1:

In Citrix Receiver I tried to logon remotely via NetScaler Gateway and got the following error message: “Cannot get your apps from the store”

Citrix Receiver

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If you try to enable “Developer mode” on the VW Discover Pro navigation with VCDS you will get the following error: “Request out of range:”

This happens because VCDS uses a type 0x02 (Programming) session but this adaptation needs type 0x4F (Developer) session.

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Today I stumbled upon Shodan, a search engine for devices and services.

I decided to search for Citrix and this was the first page of results:

It’s interesting to see that we get details such as the name of published applications. But it’s possible to get even more details:

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When I was trying to delete a folder from my local harddrive (cygwin64 in my case) I got the following error message: “Invalid file handle.“:

I then attempted to delete the folder from the command prompt which failed as well with an “Access is denied” error:

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There has long been a debate about how to accurately view the size of your Citrix Provisioning Services ram cache size. SO much so that even Citrix clarified on how to view this detail using yet another tool

The thing is, this is all fine and well, but it’s a bit of a pig to actually get this data when you need it, or in an automated way. Wouldn’t it be better if we could have something easier?

Lately, Andrew Morgan and I decided to sit down and create an easy to use, Windows performance counter for the key metrics in a PVS cache and provide them to the community for use.

These counters turned out to be fascinating, as they really show how the cache works.

Our latest counters (which can be downloaded below) provide the following counters for easy access:

• PVS Ram cache size (MB)
• PVS metadata size (MB)
• PVS Write Cache VHD disk size (MB)
• PVS Ram Cache Percent used. *


* As there is no accurate way to detect how much ram is assigned to cache via Citrix Provisioning services, this value must be provided or this performance counter is missing.

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Recently support for NPAPI has been removed from Google Chrome. While understandable from a security point of view it does mean that some plugins no longer work.

A good example is VMware’s Client Integration Plugin where we’ve lost the ability to upload an ovf template. While VMware has published a fix for vCenter (see this kb), it has not been fixed for vCloud Director:

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In versions prior to 6.0 VMware supplied the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) as an OVF template that could be imported directly.

Starting with version 6.0 the installation process has changed and now consist of an .iso file containing a custom, HTML based, installer. Vladan Seget has a nice blog post where he describes the installation.

This installation process is annoying, it needs a separate client (Windows) machine to run the installer on, requires the Client Integration Plugin (which doesn’t appear to run well on chrome now that support for npapi/dpapi has been removed):

But even worse is that we cannot import VCSA 6.0 in vCloud Director. Even converting the OVF inside the iso file doesn’t help because vCloud directory lacks support for Deployment Options.

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I’m using Windows 10 with BootCamp on my MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015). Overall I’m pretty happy with the hardware but Apple seems to limit functionality when running under Windows.

A good example is the trackpad which simply doesn’t operate as smoothly as under Mac OSX. This isn’t because Windows is a less good Operating System, it’s simply Apple supplying drivers and support software this is less good.

For the trackpad I found a good solution with Trackpad++ which enables 2, 3- and 4-finger gestures and improves scrolling.

The AMD Display Drivers as supplied with BootCamp are instable leading to “Display driver stopped responding” messages.

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The Citrix ShareFile Sync application is quite limited in functionality, one of those limitations is that you can only synchronize to a single (one) local folder.

As Helge Klein wrote in his excellent article "Configuring Citrix ShareFile Sync from PowerShell" this is simply a GUI restriction and not a restriction in the actual ShareFile sync engine.

Helge describes that you can easily do this in PowerShell with the following example:

While the command was accepted, nothing was synchronized.

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