A hard, rough, abrasive look at camel spotting…no dromedaries…no virtualization.
It’s that time again! No not Valentines Day! It’s time for the 2018 State of VDI/SBC Union Survey. Ruben Spruijt and Mark Plettenberg continue to drive one of the EUC industry’s largest and most valuable surveys. I encourage you to participate in this survey because it benefits all of us who deploy and manage EUC solutions.
Click here to take the VDI Like a Pro – “State of the VDI and SBC union” survey
In my new job, I get to work on a dedicated Citrix team again and I’m really enjoying it. I get the opportunity to work collaboratively with a group of experienced Citrix Admins/Engineers and also get the chance to do a lot of PowerShell. Recently, we had to run Helge Klein’s excellent Delprof2 against a set of servers because of space issues. After fixing the issue, I thought it would be a good chance to stretch my PowerShell skills and enhance a tool the team uses.
The original script runs fine, it just runs against the entire farm which in this case is over 700 servers. I wanted to create a script for our XenApp 6.5 environment and leverage Worker Groups to group our servers. I also wanted to try a graphical interface for the script.
I know, I know. Using a GUI with a PowerShell script is not typical, but I felt it was the best way to present a list of Worker Groups. Your Citrix environment may be smaller or not using that many worker groups, so displaying a list in the console may make more sense. I found this post which outlined how to do a list box in PowerShell.
First, I modified the dimensions of the parts of the list box so it would display all my worker groups.
Then, I populated the list box with worker groups using get-xaworkergroup
Finally, I display the List box and wait for the user to select a Worker Group and click OK or Cancel and stop the script.
If the user does pick a worker group and clicks OK, then we iterate through the servers in the Work Group and run delprof2.exe against them. This is where you could implement your own tool or procedure.
Here’s the list box:
Selecting a Worker group and clicking OK, will run delprof2.exe against all the servers in the WG.
You can get the script from Github.
Thanks for reading,
Alain Assaf
Solarwinds Advanced Subnet Calculator (ASC) is a great, freely-available tool to generates lists of IP4 networks. I recently ran into an issue installing it in a Windows 7 virtual desktop. It would run fine for administrators, but regular users received errors like this and this.
I broke out Process Monitor and Regshot to investigate what was going on here. I found that regular users could not register the SWLogo.ocx file listed in the above link. This makes sense as I had applied reasonable security on non-admins.
I reinstalled the ASC as the local admin (i.e. non-domain administrator) and that fixed one error for users, but a new one popped up. Running Process Monitor again, I found that ASC was expecting read/write permissions on
c:\programdata\Solarwinds\VB\Banners.
This folder contains a series of bitmap banner ads for Solarwinds products. Not at all unreasonable for a free tool. Once I modified permissions in the disk image to allow users to modify (ha!) this folder I was back in business.
Thanks,
Alain
