Joseph Nord
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USB Thumb Drive is slow
I move around computers a lot. For work, life is easy, it's all on Citrix XenDesktop and the data is just ... "there". At home, I also have lots of computers but I gave up long ago declaring any of them "primary". All of my personal data lives on removable media, which I generally carry with me on a USB Thumb Drive or on SDCard, ...
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Passwords suck!
Arriving to work this morning, I'm locked out of my domain account again today and with this, I start to ponder the egregious failure of passwords as an authentication technique. It is time to start thinking of something better. Hit your favorite search engine with "Passwords suck" and you can be entertained for hours. Entertained because lots of other people share your same frustration. In IT ...
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Lock hacking and parallels to computer security
My son got a new lock for school yesterday, it's a Master Lock model 1500i. As opposed to the classic twist dial, this new modern lock has a joystick sequence to open. Push the bar: Up, Down, Left, Right then pull to open. He brings it home; hey dad, look at this shiny new lock! As a computer programmer, my immediate response is "wow, that's ...
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App Streaming – PolicyPak Software
PolicyPak software have announced support for managing application policy for applications run under Citrix Application Streaming. This applies for applications run as stream to endpoint (stream to desktop) as well as stream to XenApp server. The link above includes a 15 minute video which is an excellent tutorial on PolicyPak in general and in specific, the linkage of PolicyPak with Citrix App Streaming. What's this about? It ...
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App Streaming – WinSxS
Windows Side by Side is a complicated beast and a source of much confusion in Windows system administration. Today's post provides a foundation in WinSxS and goes into considerable detail about how this works with Citrix App Streaming. History DLL Hell is the root of all evil and the Microsoft C runtime is the root of DLL Hell. In case anyone is counting, that's "2" statements describing ...
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App Streaming – Custom app dev guidelines
I received an interesting inquiry recently - we are writing applications specifically to be run under Citrix App Streaming and we want to make sure we don't do things that will cause complications at runtime. Can you tell us what to avoid in programming so we can ensure that our applications work well with Citrix Application Streaming? What a nice way to word this! Very positive. ...
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App Streaming – Mounting VHDs on XenApp
In an earlier article, I described the new capabilities in App Streaming 6.5 to use mounted VHDs to implement layer of cake on XenDesktop. This is great stuff for separating operating system image from application image and greatly assists administrator management of computer systems in a virtualized + pooled XenDesktop world. Some comments in the prior article and similar queries from sales engineer and customer ...
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Touch utility with read-only opens
In Application Virtualization and specifically Citrix Application Streaming, files get "populated" into the execution machine when they are "opened". Until they are opened, the isolation system LIES to the application to tell it the files are present, when they really aren't there. The same thing applies to Citrix Profile Management where the contents of %USERPROFILE% are not really populated onto the execution machine until something "opens" ...
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App Streaming – Profiler SDK BatchProfile
On the theme of a new version of the Streaming Profiler SDK being released with XenApp 6.5, here's a link to another example program, BatchProfile which will create a streaming profile based on the no-user involved execution of an installation program or MSI. The standard Streaming Profiler application is divided into two pieces. The GUI is in pkgr.exe, this is the program that runs when you ...
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App Streaming – Profiler SDK ScriptUtil
Ahh - XenApp 6.5 is out and this means that the new streaming client is out and it means that the updated Streaming Profiler SDK is out and ... this means that my profile script manipulating example program I wrote a few months back can finally be published. Oh! Happy Day! The history Some time back, I received an inquiry on how to add a script to ...