Michael Phillips Blog

Unable to login to Citrix server via RDP or ICA

We have recently set up some new Windows Server 2008 R2/Citrix XenApp 6.0 servers.  For some reason, users could not launch a remote desktop to them even though we (thought) allowed this.  Turns out there is a policy which blocks this by default.  I found the answer here:

Re: Unable to login using RDP or ICA after installing XenApp 6
Posted: Mar 31, 2010 5:27 PM   in response to: Aref Mukred

Correct

4 users found this post useful

Hi Aref -
Can you please try the following ?
1. Open Delivery Services Console
2. Edit the unfiltered user policy | ICA
3. Set the policy for Desktop Launches to Allowed
This policy applies to XenApp 6.0 and Allows or prevents non-administrative users to connect to a desktop session on the server.
When allowed, non-administrative users can connect. By default, non-administrative users cannot connect to desktop sessions.
Thanks
Ramesh

Citrix Forums : Unable to login using RDP or ICA after …

The answer above will get you there, but as my teachers used to tell me all the time, he needs to “show his work”:

“Blue Screens”

Mark Russinovich writes his blog posts for people who want to get REALLY deep into the causes of computer problems.  But today, he posted something that is a little on the “fun” side as well. 

“Blue Screens” in Designer Colors with One Click

markrussinovich

11 Jan 2011 12:15 PM

• Comments 0

My last blog post described how to use local kernel debugging to change the colors of the Windows crash screen, also known as the “blue screen of death”. No doubt many of you thought that showing off a green screen of death or red screen of death to your friends and family would be fun, but the steps involved too complicated.

“Blue Screens” in Designer Colors with One Click – Mark’s Blog – Site Home – TechNet Blogs

Changes in Leadership within the Server & Tools Business.

Wonder what this will mean for the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft?

In conjunction with this leadership change, Bob has decided to leave Microsoft this summer. He will continue to actively run STB as I conduct an internal and external search for the new leader.  Bob will onboard the new leader and will also complete additional projects for me

Steve Ballmer E-mail to Employees on Bob Muglia Transition: Text of an internal e-mail from Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer to employees regarding changes in leadership within the Server & Tools Business.

Windows cannot access the specified device

This is an old problem, but I still see it from time to time.  You are trying to run and executable that you downloaded, and you are on a Windows 2003 system.  You double click and get:

As you can see here, I am simply trying to install the windirstat utility to figure out what is taking up all the disk space.  If you have drive space issues, and we seem to always have drive space issues, this is a great utility.

The problem is this:

Notice the Security section at the bottom.  if you click on Unblock, then it looks like this:

Apply the change and the security section at the bottom goes away, and you can then run the program.

Windows 8 Plans Leaked

So apparently, Windows 8 planning slides got leaked.  A good discussion about what is contained in the slides can be found in this blog post:

Long story short, these slide decks are chock full of internal thinking on Windows 8 — everything from customer target audiences to the Windows 8 developer market to the Windows 8 product cycle and much, much more.

While I agree with the author of the post, in that I feel bad for the person who leaked this, I do think it is pretty interesting to get a look at what Microsoft is thinking.  I always find it useful to know now where they think things are going to be in the future, in the hopes that I will make better decisions about how to position myself and the company I work for to take advantage of the “new stuff” when it gets here.

The ordinal 120 could not be located in the dynamic link library iertutil.dll.

We have 5 Citrix Terminal Servers that are configured “identically”.  After installing IE8 on two of them, the following started showing up:

After a bunch of searching, I saw a few people have gotten this, but no one had a solution, or at least I couldn’t find it.  I did see a similar message related to Adobe Reader, and that is what helped me find the answer to our problem.

One of the servers was not having the problem, but it DID have IE8.  hmmm..  It also had Adobe Reader 9 installed on it.  The others had Adobe Reader 8. 

So to fix the problem, required uninstalling IE8, updating to AR9, and then reinstalling IE8.  I did try just installing the updated Adobe Reader, but it still got the error until I uninstalled IE8. 

TechNet wiki…

So a TechNet wiki is coming, as stated by Keith Combs here:

three big things we focus on for all TechNet scenarios are Content, Discoverability, and Participation. We really want to invite participation from everyone and what better way to combine that with discovery and content than to use Wiki technology?

Later this year TechNet and the Server & Cloud Division will partner to launch the new TechNet Wiki.
…
We believe a public wiki for technical content on TechNet has the potential to be a big step forward in all three areas:

• For content, while Microsoft teams write some great content, we cannot possibly author all the content customers need to be successful, and a wiki that offers content from the community will increase the breadth and depth of technical content available for IT Pros.
• For participation, the wiki is a great new way for any IT pro to create and share technical knowledge, engage with other technical people and with Microsoft, and build an identity and reputation within the TechNet community.

I used the word "potential" above because Microsoft cannot succeed with the TechNet Wiki on its own – success ultimately depends on the direct engagement, support, and ongoing feedback from the IT community.

I am not sure how I feel about this.  I like Wikipedia, and OFTEN reference it for information on non-work related topics.  We use a SharePoint wiki for a lot of our documentation where I work, but I don’t find it to be as useful as I would like, because for some reason, I don’t like the interface.  One of the big issues I have with it, is the inability to insert pictures directly in the article during the creation of the article.  You have to upload the picture (such as a screenshot) separately and then link to it.  That doesn’t seem very efficient to me.

With this blog, I use Windows Live Writer.  It allows me to take a snip like this:

and paste it right in the text.  When I publish, it is auto-magically uploaded and linked to my post.  I think the other issue that I have is that I am afraid I would take it personally if someone felt the need to correct something  I posted to a wiki.

I guess I am going to have to work on that.  Both for the wiki at work and (maybe) for the TechNet wiki.  There are those occasions when I actually have useful knowledge to share…

Monitoring drive space

One of the things that we spend a lot of time on is trying to keep track of what servers have enough free space.  We have a lot of different tools to check drive space, and we even use some of them from time to time.  We have a pretty complicated system created by Rickey that creates a nice webpage, with highlighting for problem areas (percentage change from day to day, current percent free, etc.)  It even puts the info into a database for historical reporting.

We don’t store or report on VMs currently, mainly because we were trying to keep track of total REAL disk used.  VMs often don’t use as much as they think they do, so that would skew the results, as well as the fact that we are reporting on the hosts. 

All of that is the reason that Patrick asked me to come up with some other tool to use for the VMs so I happened to find a few pieces of PowerShell script that I managed to put together to do a pretty good job of providing some of the info we wanted, and I thought I would share that with the 2 people who read my blog. 

$servers = Get-Content servers.txt

#Open Excel and create a new workbook and worksheet
$ExcelSheet=New-Object -comobject Excel.application   
$WorkBook=$ExcelSheet.WorkBooks.add(1)    
$WorkSheet=$WorkBook.WorkSheets.item(1)               

#Header row
$WorkSheet.cells.item(1,1)=”Computer Name”               
$WorkSheet.cells.item(1,2)=”Disk Device ID”              
$WorkSheet.cells.item(1,3)=”Volume Name”                 
$WorkSheet.cells.item(1,4)=”Size (GB)”        
$WorkSheet.cells.item(1,5)=”Free Space (GB)”
$WorkSheet.cells.item(1,6)=”Space Used (GB)”
$WorkSheet.cells.item(1,7)=”Percent Used”

$i=2

ForEach ($ComputerName in $servers)
{   
    echo "Server Name : ", $ComputerName
    $Disks = gwmi –computername $ComputerName win32_logicaldisk -filter "drivetype=3"

    foreach ($Disk in $Disks)
    {
        $Size = "{0:0.0}" -f ($Disk.Size/1GB)
        $FreeSpace = "{0:0.0}" -f ($Disk.FreeSpace/1GB)
        $Used = ([int64]$Disk.size – [int64]$Disk.freespace)
        $SpaceUsed = "{0:0.0}" -f ($Used/1GB)
        $Percent = ($Used * 100.0)/$Disk.Size
        $Percent = "{0:N0}" -f $Percent
               $WorkSheet.cells.item($i,1)=$ComputerName
            $WorkSheet.cells.item($i,2)=$Disk.deviceid
            $WorkSheet.cells.item($i,3)=$Disk.volumename
            $WorkSheet.cells.item($i,4)=$Size
            $WorkSheet.cells.item($i,5)=$FreeSpace
            $WorkSheet.cells.item($i,6)=$SpaceUsed
            $WorkSheet.cells.item($i,7)=$Percent

            $i=$i+1     
    }
}
#Show the results
$ExcelSheet.visible=$true

Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7

As a follow up to my earlier post about the Remote server Administration Tools for the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC), I thought I would post a link to the RTM version.  It took a bit to find it.  A search on Microsoft’s site wasn’t helpful to me.  I finally found a reference on Ben’s Blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2009/08/12/rsat-for-windows-7-rtm-now-available.aspx

Which sent me here:

Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7

Brief Description

Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows® 7 enables IT administrators to manage roles and features that are installed on computers that are running Windows Server® 2008 R2, Windows Server® 2008, or Windows Server® 2003, from a remote computer that is running Windows 7.

Download details: Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7

Temporary Registry Profiles – Finally an answer

We have been having issues at work for a while where a user gets “cannot load the locally stored profile” and a temporary profile is created.  It gets to be quite frustrating for the users because each time they log in they lose any settings that they have made.  Apparently, we arent’ the only company that has been having this issue.  The complete article has a very interesting discussion on the Windows Logical Prefetcher and what the cause of the problem was, but the gist of what you need to fix the problem is update your Citrix client or use the work arounds mentioned below:

Now that the problem was understood, Microsoft and Citrix brainstormed on workarounds customers could apply while Citrix worked on an update to the ICA Client that would prevent the sharing violation. One workaround was to disable application prefetching and another was to write a logoff script that deletes the Ssonsvr.exe prefetch files. Citrix published the workarounds in this Citrix Knowledge Base article and Microsoft in this Microsoft Knowledge Base article. The update to the ICA Client, which was made available a few days later, changed the network provider DLL to 10 seconds after Ssonsvr.exe launches before returning control to Mpnotify.exe. Because Winlogon waits for Mpnotify to exit before logging on a user, the Logical Prefetcher won’t associate Winlogon’s accesses of the user’s hive with Ssonsvr.exe’s startup.

Mark’s Blog : The Case of the Temporary Registry Profiles