Certifications are often lambasted as “worthless pieces of paper” and “experience is more important.” But for some people, certifications are more important than experience.
A substitute for experience Newcomers to the IT world face the classic problem: how do you get experience without a job? Sure, you can tinker around on your own time, but how do you prove that experience? That’s where certifications come in.
Certifications show a prospective employer that you care enough and have the initiative to spend your own time and money to become a better IT professional.
I recently ran into a bizarre issue with users not being able to launch applications from a very old Citrix Presentation Server 4.0 farm when trying to launch from Citrix Web Interface 5.4. They were getting the eminently unhelpful, “An error occurred while making the requested connection.”
The Diagnosis In the web interface application logs, I noticed this:
An error of type IMA with an error ID of 0x80000003 was reported from the Citrix XML Service at address (servername)
1. Disable unused Group Policy sections
In each of the GPOs that are applied to your servers and users, both User and Computer processing is enabled by default. Disabling unused parts of a GPO can shave some time off both logons and server booting. You can do this in the GPO properties. Just bring up the GPO in Group Policy Management Editor, right-click the policy name, and click Properties.
One of the problems that has plagued Citrix admins and engineers has been third party print drivers. All it takes is for one bad print driver to misbehave, crash the print spooler, and generate dozens of support calls from users who suddenly cannot print.
This common problem led to Citrix including the Citrix Universal Print Driver (Citrix UPD) which is compatible with many popular printers, and is much easier on the Windows print spooler.
In many Citrix environments it’s common to have a large variety of ICA client versions. One thing that sometimes surprises users and IT folks alike is how much of a performance increase can be seen after upgrading an old ICA client. But how do you know which clients need upgrading?
One of the biggest challenges has been deciphering what ICA client version the cryptic “client build number” in a user’s session information translates to.
Recently I have seen a couple of cases where the Citrix Receiver 3 client produces the following error when trying to launch a published application:
Error number 2320<br /> Citrix online plug-in Configuration Manager: No value could be found for (ClientHostedApps) that satisfies all lockdown requirements. The lockdown requirements in force may be conflicting.
The most salient part of the error message is in between the parenthesis. In the error message above, ClientHostedApps is a registry value that resides in two locations: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Citrix\ICA Client\Engine\Lockdown Profiles\All Regions\Lockdown\Virtual Channels\Control (on 64-bit systems: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Citrix\ICA Client\Engine\Lockdown Profiles\All Regions\Lockdown\Virtual Channels\Control) and HKCU\SOFTWARE\Citrix\ICA Client\Engine\Lockdown Profiles\All Regions\Lockdown\Virtual Channels\Control
Sometimes there is a need to publish an application to individual XenApp servers for baselining or troubleshooting purposes. But if you have a lot of published applications in your XenApp 6 farm, this can be a huge hassle. Thankfully PowerShell allows us to quickly and easily take our existing published applications and automatically create individually published apps for each server. We can use Worker Groups to control which servers get an individually published application.