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Archive for category Remote Desktop Sessions

Mandatory Profile Considerations

Jul 6

Posted by virtuEs in HowTo, Remote Desktop Sessions, User Profiles | Comments off


This blog is a quick note to summarize all the considerations I faced when (re)introducing Mandatory Profiles for a very basic (SMB) Citrix XenApp implementation.

First of all I needed to create a Mandatory Profile on Windows Server 2008 R2, using the following instructions from Mark Swinkels, which stated the following actions:

  • Make a local user on the server (Windows Server 2008 R2 in my environment)
  • Make the user member of the local administrators group on your server
  • Login in with this user and customize for example the start menu
  • Logoff and login again with an administrator account
  • Create a share on your file server. For example \\[servername]\TSmandatory 
    (I used a local folder on the XenApp server)
  • For share permissions choose Everyone Full Control, NTFS permissions choose Authenticated Users Read
  • Turn off Caching on this share
  • Copy the complete template folder from the C:\Users directory to the new TSmandatory share
  • Rename the template folder to TSmandatory.V2

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Citrix XenApp 6.5 launches published desktop but no published applications

Apr 23

Posted by virtuEs in Remote Desktop Sessions, Troubleshooting | 6 Comments


Today I was faced with a mysterious phenomemon. After getting the first Citrix XenApp 6.5 server farm up and running, I started to work on a second farm, that was installed in exactly the same fashion. The only difference between both farms was that the new farm would solely depend on a Citrix XenApp Services site, where the first farm used a Citrix XenApp Web Site.

When I started my test published application, aka Notepad, I was faced with the following error:

CXA65 Error: Failed to start

After starting a published application, the following error is shown

The weird part was that when I added a published desktop to the mix, it started just fine and Notepad would also run without any error message within that published desktop. So the error was not account or ACL based.

Along with the shown error message, an Event was also logged with Event ID 1480 in the Application Windows Log, saying ” Failed to launch application notepad with command line c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe . ensure the application is installed and user has permission to launch it.

Hopefull this would quickly let me google a solution it took me a long time reading alot of unsolved forum topics with a variety of tried fixes, it took me a long time to discover an ancient support article from Citrix, CTX996187 for MetaFrame XP. Even though the article was not updated after july 2003, I decided to have a look at the mentioned registry key.

So checking HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon, I discovered that the AppSetup (REG_SZ) only had the following data USRLOGON.CMD, where the registry key on the working XenApp 6.5 server in the other farm, showed a different value:

CXA65_regkey_winlogon

The winlogon registry key as found on the healthy XenApp server

When I changed the value on my broken XenApp 6.5 server and tested the Notepad published appliaction, to my surprise, it worked like a charm and I had a fully functional XenApp server back on track.

To ensure I will not lose alot of time fixing this error when I might run into it again in the future, I’ve written this blog and hope it can help others as well

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RDS/CTX Shortcut Keys list

Nov 26

Posted by virtuEs in Favorites, HowTo, Remote Desktop Sessions | 1 Comment


A handy list to keep closeby is the shortcurt key list for Remote Desktop Connections and Citrix Sessions. So just to make sure I know where to find it, I’m posting the list on my site.

 

This post offers a list of shortcut keys that are available for RDS and CTX sessions.

 
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