Editing Farm Policies using the XenDesktop 5 SDK

Editing the XenDesktop Farm policies with PowerShell is not that hard, if you know how. I couldn’t find much, if any, documentation about the subject (only some for XenApp 6), so here’s a quick how to:

First, you start with adding the necessary Citrix PowerShell modules with (you perform this on a XD Controller on another machine with the XenDesktop SDK installed):

Add-PSSnapin Citrix.*

For convenience, we’re going to map the XDFarm policies to a drive, so we can browse it easily:

New-PSDrive XDFarm -root \ -PSProvider CitrixGroupPolicy -Controller <FQDN of a XD Controller>

From there you can browse the XD Farm policies easily:

Set-Location XDFarm:\
PS XDFarm:\> Get-ChildItem
User
Computer

If, for example, you would like to add multiple session printers to the Unfiltered User policy you would perform the following:

Set-ItemProperty XDFarm:\User\Unfiltered\Settings\ICA\printing\SessionPrinters
-name Values
-value @("<pathA>,model=<modelA>,location=<locationA>","<pathB>,model=<modelB>,location=<locationB>")

So, there you have it :)

Do note that you’re working with an in-memory version of the CitrixGroupPolicy object. That means that if you change settings in the Citrix Desktop Studio, this won’t be reflected in the current instance. Changes that you make however will be automatically written back to the XenDesktop database.

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Controlling information

I’m putting some more time in to properly set up my blog. Things yet to do is create an own theme… and well, create more blogposts :-)

One important thing is how to control information in the world of Twitter’s, Facebook’s and Google +’s of this world. As you know, these services rise and fall, and when they fall, your content does too. Then there’s obviously features that are redundantly provided by many of such services, like giving a status update. What’s also annoying is that you need to update each and every service (why are you using them otherwise?) and that becomes a chore quickly.

So what I’m about to do, is to centralize everything in my personal WordPress blog. It’s hosted by myself, so it’s my content and I can do anything I’d like to do with it. And to make life easier, I’m going to use the Twitter Tools plug-in to automatically tweet updates. In Facebook, I’ve integrated the Twitter app, so tweets should also show up as Facebook update. So yeah, it’s kind of experimental ;-)

Let’s see how this works out…

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Client Drive Mapping failing

A collegue of mine had troubles getting Client Drive Mapping (CDM) to work with his new Citrix XenApp 6.5 environment. So I checked the regular stuff;

  • Is CDM policy configured? Correctly applied? (Yep)
  • Are no group policies configured which might be blocking CDM? (Nope)
  • Is CDM blocked on the ICA-tcp protocol? (Nope)
  • Is CDM working over RDP? (Yep)

Well, all seemed to be configured correctly. Since XenApp 6.5 is (at this time of writing) a Technical Preview, I almost filed it as a bug.

For a last attempt I turned to CTX238200 – Troubleshooting Client Drive Mapping. I verified all points meticulously until I got to point 7:

7. Ensure that Client Network is visible under Network Neighborhood. If it is not, follow the steps listed below:
a. Start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe) and go to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\NetworkProvider\Order
The
value for ProviderOrder contained only LanmanWorkstation.
Add CdmService, so
that the Value now reads “CdmService,LanmanWorkstation.”

b. For Presentation Server 4.5, ensure the path defined under the
CommonFilesDir value from
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion is
correct.

c. Restart the server

So I checked HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\NetworkProvider\Order, and found no CdmService, only LanManWorkstation. Hey, that could be it! So I put CdmService in there, but unfortunately, after a reboot, the drives still weren’t mapped. I turned to another environment I’ve setup at another customer with XenApp 6, where I knew that CDM was working fine. So I checked the Order value there:

Order key

Hmm, PICAClientNetwork looks interesting. And lo and behold, with PICAClientNetwork in the Order key (and rebooting), CDM worked!

So next time, you have troubles with CDM on XenApp 6(.5) and all seems to be configured well, don’t forget this one ;-)

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My first post

Well, I’ve just installed WordPress… now to think about something to write :-)

Hmm, that’ll be for tomorrow.

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