Imagine you need to determine the size of a directory, but you do not have access to it and cannot change the permissions, either. Such a situation is common with Windows user profiles. This article shows how to deal with it.

When I tried to connect to the administrative file share C$ on my wife’s computer I got the error A device attached to the system is not functioning. The other way round worked without a hitch, i.e. I could access my laptop’s C$ share from my wife’s computer.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. As you may be aware Citrix Profile Management (aka UPM) automatically migrates existing roaming or local user profiles to its user store. A very nice feature, certainly, but what about the way back? That is the gist of a question I received today and would like to answer here.

If you have ever been to a conference with a Splunk booth you will have noticed their t-shirts. They are all black with a cool slogan printed in white. When you have been working with Splunk for some time you will notice that it has a very powerful commandline tool, splunk.exe. You can use that to tell Splunk’s deployment server component that one or more apps have changed, for example, with this command: splunk.exe reload deploy-server.

I am sure you all love XenDesktop VDAs that just won’t register. Although this is becoming less and less of a problem I had another case recently. Checking the Obvious When a XenDesktop VDA is unregistered the first thing I do is check if the VM is actually turned on. With that out of the way I turn to the application event log, looking for entries with the source Citrix Desktop Service. This usually tells you what the problem is. Not this time, however. Apparently the Citrix Desktop Service (aka WorkstationAgent) ran into some error during startup. It logged the following event with ID 1006 and stopped:

PowerCfg is a nifty little tool for analyzing and configuring all kinds of things related to battery usage and power plans. In Windows 8.1 PowerCfg learned how to analyze the effectiveness of connected standby, a new low-power mode introduced in Windows 8 that enables applications to stay connected while the device (mostly) sleeps. All the more frustrating when that new command suddenly stops working.

The most obscure effects often have the simplest explanations - once you know where to go looking for them. Luckily uberAgent tells you exactly what is going on. People often ask about the resource footprint of uberAgent. I usually tell them “no IO at all, around 15 MB RAM and below 0.5% CPU” and everybody is happy. Not this time, however.

I am an infrastructure guy (by heart - and a developer by nature). As such, topics like maintaining my own webserver (which I don’t - yet) or configuring backup deeply fascinate me. I am also mildly paranoid with regards to the safety and, especially as of late, the privacy of my data. That makes finding the perfect backup strategy a very interesting occupation, indeed.

This is what I have been doing for the past few days: draining the battery of my new Dell Venue Pro 11, a Windows 8.1 tablet (the real deal, not RT). I wanted to find out how good Windows has become at battery-efficient video playback and how that is affected by GPU acceleration.

Splunk has a very extensive REST API - which is just a fancy way of saying that many of its capabilities are accessible via standard HTTP(S) requests. While much of the API is well documented, submitting data from C# to Splunk is kept a bit vague. Since I had to do that recently in order to implement an event generator for uberAgent I thought I might share my two solutions, both with and without the Splunk SDK for C#.

When you have a cloud-based file sharing service it makes a lot of sense to synchronize part or all of the data with your desktop computer. Citrix ShareFile offers the Sync for Windows tool for that purpose. However, once you open its configuration screen you notice that has a severe restriction: it can only synchronize to a single local folder. In many cases it would make much more sense to synchronize different cloud folders to different locations on your hard disk. When I complained to the product manager Peter Schulz about this I learned about a hidden gem: the single folder restriction is only present in the UI; the underlying sync engine is much more flexible. And the best thing is: the sync engine can be configured from PowerShell. Here is how.

With the advent of BYO it has become fashionable to regard PCs as untrusted devices that should be isolated in a dedicated security zone. Zoning Such an approach has a big advantage: by separating clients from servers it is possible to treat them differently and potentially apply more relaxed security policies - which is a basic requirement for BYO. In a truly BYO-only environment you block everything except Citrix ICA or some other remoting procotol of choice at the firewall and life is good. In real corporate networks things are a bit more complicated, however. Say you want to isolate your managed Windows PCs. In that case you might want to be able to manage them remotely from systems outside the client security zone (e.g. from management terminal servers). And suddenly you have a problem: Windows management protocols, especially RPC and DCOM, are not exactly firewall-friendly.

This is the third article in a multi-part series about building and maintaining an inexpensive scalable platform for VDI in enterprise environments. Previously in this Series In the last article I explained that shared storage should be avoided, for two reasons: it is (very) expensive, and you, the VDI guy, are not in control. The storage guys are.

This is the second article in a multi-part series about building and maintaining an inexpensive scalable platform for VDI in enterprise environments. Previously in this Series I started this series by defining requirements. Without proper requirements, everything else is moot. Remember that we are looking at running typical enterprise desktop workloads, we are trying to centralize desktops and our primary desktop hosting technology is multi-user Windows, aka RDS/XenApp.

Application startup duration is an essential component of user experience. If you want to make sure that UX on your Windows machines is acceptable you need to monitor the time it takes for applications to start up. That, however, is not exactly easy - without uberAgent for Splunk.

This is the first article in a multi-part series about building and maintaining an inexpensive scalable platform for VDI in enterprise environments. Requirements Before we can even start to think about a possible architecture, we need requirements. Only requirements enable us to make choices that benefit the customer. Without proper requirements we are not building for the real world but for some alternate reality. Please keep in mind when reading this article that the solution presented here only makes sense for you if your requirements are similar.

It sometimes happens when I reply to an e-mail from somebody who is asking about my products that the receiving mail server rejects my message with the code “554 rejected due to spam content”.

When you use XenDesktop the only way it makes sense you may find that Citrix has not really put much effort into making that a smooth experience. Persistent is a Second-Grade Citizen XenDesktop is really designed to be used with pooled desktops - machines that are reset to a pristine state when the user logs off. Of course, stateless desktops are much better (and, importantly, cheaper) served from XenApp. This has been the topic of many a debate which I will not repeat here. But I will state that if you give a so-called knowledge worker a personal desktop, you better make sure that desktop is persistent.

Processing several terabytes of data per day is not too uncommon and easily possible with Splunk - that is one of the many things I learned at .conf 2013 in Las Vegas.

This is a collection of answers to questions around Atlantis Ilio you are likely to have when using the appliance in production. How Can I Get Detailed Load Information? If you want to find out what an Ilio appliance really is doing and the information displayed in Ilio Center is not detailed enough, issue the following on the command line:

Whether user profiles are loading slowly or group policy processing is taking too long - uberAgent for Splunk tells you exactly what is causing slow logons. uberAgent always supported a broad range of platforms, from physical PCs through virtual desktops to Citrix XenApp. Today we add RES Workspace Manager to that list!

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Many errors related to user profiles result in the user getting a temporary profile instead of the regular local or roaming profile. I have written about possible causes for that here. In addition to that, there is an entirely different category of errors that occur when even a temporary profile cannot be created. This article describes likely causes.

Cleanly shutting down all virtual machines on a given set of hosts is not as trivial as it might seem - especially if you want to be able to restore the original state once the planned maintenance you are doing this for is completed.

I have been using Windows 8 Client Hyper-V for a while now and must say it works like a treat - except for one thing: it is practically impossible to give VMs at the same time NATted internet access and connect them to other VMs and to the host. Windows Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) just does not work reliably and I have found no other product to use instead.