Monitoring Browser Performance per Site with uberAgent for Splunk The days are long gone when a browser was just another application. Modern websites are applications of their own, and the browser is their operating system. That has consequences for […] Read more
Why Every Self-Respecting Administrator Should Ditch Explorer For Good Windows Explorer is an end user, a consumer product. It creates a reality distortion field that hides part of what is really there and makes you see things that do […] Read more
What are Slow Logons and Where Do They Come From? Considering the importance of fast logons for a good user experience there is surprisingly little information on the subject. Windows does not even record the total logon time, let alone […] Read more
Getting USB Smart Card Readers to Work with Citrix XenDesktop Even if you only have a moderately sized VDI deployment chances are high you will face the problem of getting USB smart card readers to work on the virtual desktops. […] Read more
Windows Offline Files: Problems and Solutions This is a collection of bugs, errors and problems I encountered working with Offline Files, along with possible solutions or at least workarounds. For more information about Offline Files see […] Read more
Application Usage Metering with uberAgent for Splunk uberAgent has been pretty good at monitoring applications for some time. It is capable of auto-grouping processes to applications and showing IOPS and other stats per application in addition to […] Read more
The Impossibility of Measuring IOPS (Correctly) If you have ever used Sysinternals’ Process Monitor, chances are high you were a little intimidated when you looked at your first capture: it probably contained hundreds of thousands of […] Read more
XenDesktop Logon Failure: Desktop Viewer Pops up and Closes Know this problem? You try to start a XenDesktop session, Desktop Viewer opens … and closes. Then nothing. Read more
uberAgent for Splunk is Here The beta version of uberAgent for Splunk is available. Official news release uberAgent’s website Download Read more
Login VSI: Custom Command Line with CSV File for RDP Connections Getting Login VSI to launch sessions on multiple RD session hosts is possible with the connection type Custom command line with CSV, but it is more difficult than it should […] Read more
uberAgent for Splunk: User Experience Who said that end users get all the pretty UIs? Administrators are as happy as anyone to replace ugly consoles with good-looking HTML5 that runs on a smartphone just as […] Read more
Performance Impact of Windows Offline Files A little known fact about the Windows Offline Files functionality is it slows down network operations considerably. Here is how and why. Read more
uberAgent for Splunk: Dynamic Application Identification uberAgent for Splunk monitors Windows machines. It does not try to display as much data as possible but focuses on visualizing what is actually going on instead. In the last […] Read more
Windows Update Error 80072EFE in Client Hyper-V Guest Client Hyper-V was one of the things I was most looking forward to when I upgraded to Windows 8. I immediately added the Hyper-V feature and went to installing Server […] Read more
Introducing uberAgent for Splunk uberAgent for Splunk takes Windows monitoring a step further. uberAgent does not just collect data – it gives you the information that matters. Other monitoring products rely on the performance […] Read more
How to Determine the Size of the System Volume Information Directory Due to the strict permissions on the System Volume Information directory finding out its true size is not easy. Read more
XenApp and RDS Sizing Part 4 – Calculating the New Farm’s Capacity This article is part of a mini-series. You can find the other articles here. In the previous articles in this series we saw how to calculate a farm’s capacity and […] Read more
Conferences 2012 and Beyond What do I do for a living? I travel to community conferences, of course. In 2012 I spent 44 days going to 10 different conferences – err, wait, that is […] Read more
Clean Install of Windows 8 on Sony Vaio S15 Sony Vaio laptops are rumored to suffer from two defects: the preloaded OS image being full of crapware, and being extremely difficult to clean install. The former is true for […] Read more
Batch Delete Issued Citrix User/Device Licenses with Udadmin Udamin.exe is a handy tool for managing Citrix user/device licenses. To get a list of currently issued licenses run it like this: C:\Program Files\Citrix\Licensing\LS>udadmin.exe -list Usage data is 15 minutes […] Read more
Lenovo T520 Maximum Memory: Not 8, But 16 GB! Contrary to what Lenovo wants to make you believe, the T520 laptop is not limited to 8 GB of RAM. I own this reliable workhorse and made the mistake of […] Read more
Citrix Profile Management Architecture – Why it is Not Based on a Mandatory Profile Any More Ron Kuper asked in a comment why the architecture of Citrix Profile Management was changed from being based on mandatory profiles to capturing the entire profile content by default. This […] Read more
Installing ESXi 4.1 on HP DL380 G8: No NICs Found This kept us occupied quite a bit: after having worked with HP’s G7 line of servers for a long time, we ordered our first DL380 G8 for use with VDI. […] Read more
XenApp and RDS Sizing Part 3 – Determining Farm Load This article is part of a mini-series. You can find the other articles here. In the previous part of this series we saw how to determine the capacity of a […] Read more
Solution to “Windows Cannot be Installed to this Disk” I encountered a strange error when I moved my laptop’s hard drive to another computer to make room for an SSD. When I tried to install Windows 8 on the […] Read more
The Sad State of Web Forums – and some Alternatives The software industry in general is a very fast moving business, but even in this sector there are niches that allow species to survive that should, by normal means, have […] Read more
Choosing a Laptop, 2012 Edition I have been using Lenovo laptops for more than seven years. They never failed me – not a single hardware fault or software instability in all those years. OK, not […] Read more
Show Me Your Start Menu and I’ll Tell You Who You Are A Windows 7 start menu tells a lot about the user that, indirectly, created it. This is what mine looks like: So what does that say about me? Background This […] Read more
XenApp and RDS Sizing Part 2 – Determining Farm Capacity This article is part of a mini-series. You can find the other articles here. As we have seen in part 1 of this series, when sizing a new farm the […] Read more
Knowledge Base Gems While I am generally satisfied with the quality of Microsoft Knowledge Base articles (many other vendors’ KBs are far worse), from time to time I encounter articles that either lack […] Read more
