Roberto Alves

Enable again toolbars in Excel 2003

Roberto — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:05:04 +0000

Sometimes you can be very surprised with the amount of irresponsible people doing some code as vbs scripts, programs or even simple excel macros that can negatively affect production environments. Last week I got a very simple problem, that can be frustrating for a user. Some external partner of my company created a Excel spreadsheet [...]

Easily running commands in all servers/workstations

Roberto — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 09:54:09 +0000

Sometimes we are diving into so many tools, products, technologies, etc that we forgot simple and old tools that can save the day or at least save a good time. I will give as example the Sysinternals psexec, that is very useful to run remote commands. Let’s imagine that you need force a policy update [...]

.vbs script to restrict access only from internet to Citrix XenApp or TS servers

Roberto — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:35:51 +0000

This vbs script consist into two verifications to restrict access of users from internet in Citrix XenApp (Presentation Server/Metaframe) servers or Terminal Services, to be included in the session initialization. The idea of this script allow access from users from Internet just if they are in a specific Active Directory group. In the first verification, [...]

Simple and better solution to redirect local drives in XenApp sessions

Roberto — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:04:01 +0000

ICA or RDP are not the best protocols to copy files between DataCentres and remote workstations. But, some times is very difficult to implement a different solution to provide access to users local files from Citrix XenApp or Terminal Services, and even if the idea was rejected in the design of your environment, one day [...]

Is Citrix FastLaunch a good option to improve logon time of Citrix XenApp sessions?

Roberto — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:43:32 +0000

In this month Citrix released a new utility called FastLaunch. This is not a official supported utility or even a tech preview. It is just a very small utility made by IT guys in Citrix to “hold” Citrix sessions, providing to users reconnect their sessions every time, instead to logon again. This tool was created [...]

XML-based map network drives for login scripts

Roberto — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:21:53 +0000

I found at VisualBasicScript.com Forum a very useful script wrote by a user called “ginolard”, that can be used at login scripts or if you need, you can use the basic structure of this script into others scripts with different proposes. Basically, this script read a XML file and execute mapnetwork commands considering the information [...]

Impact of PDF Readers in Citrix/TS environments

Roberto — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 13:01:06 +0000

Day by day, PDF files are becoming more and more popular and in some cases, more used than .doc files! And I bet that many Citrix administrators never stopped to think how much the PDF Readers are affecting the server performance and scalability in a Citrix farm, considering that memory consumption of PDF readers can [...]

Different procedure to rename Citrix XenApp 5 Servers

Roberto — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:04:04 +0000

Rename a Citrix XenApp Server (Presentation Server/Metaframe) Is a very common administrative task, but many administrators ignore that Citrix has recommendations to be followed. And this recommendations are different from XenApp 4.0/4.5 than XenApp 5. Basically, there is only one item that was included by Citrix on the procedure to rename servers. But is very [...]

Building quickly a XenApp 4.5 server for demonstration

Roberto — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:08:31 +0000

Sometimes we need install a simple XenApp environment for some porprouse like training, pre-sales, show some funcionality, test something before put in production, test an application to see if is compatible, etc. and depending of the propourse, you might spend some hours doing this boring task. But for XenApp 4.5, you can use a freeware [...]

White Web Interface for Citrix XenApp 5

Roberto — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:52:15 +0000

Citrix brought some benefits launching XenApp 5, and the majors were support to Windows 2008 and a reformulated Web Interface. The new Web Interface 5 is very cool, using the most new CSS techniques and is more smart, recognizing the browser capabilities that each user is using (including mobiles). Also, the new Web Interface 5 [...]