Certifications are often lambasted as “worthless pieces of paper” and “experience is more important.” But for some people, certifications are more important than experience.

A substitute for experience

Newcomers to the IT world face the classic problem: how do you get experience without a job? Sure, you can tinker …

I recently ran into a bizarre issue with users not being able to launch applications from a very old Citrix Presentation Server 4.0 farm when trying to launch from Citrix Web Interface 5.4. They were getting the eminently unhelpful, “An error occurred while making the requested connection.”

The Diagnosis

In the web …

A common question facing service providers that use XenApp to provide published applications to multiple clients is whether to use a single, large farm for all clients, or to dedicate a separate farm to each client.

Often the degree to which infrastructure is shared among clients is a matter of philosophy and …

It came to my attention today that there is a seemingly new issue with XenServer that is causing the time in Windows VMs to become offset by one day. My first thought was that this could be related to 2012 being a leap year, so I pulled up the source code for the Xen 4.1 hypervisor that handles leap years from …

1. Disable unused Group Policy sections

In each of the GPOs that are applied to your servers and users, both User and Computer processing is enabled by default. Disabling unused parts of a GPO can shave some time off both logons and server booting. You can do this in the GPO properties. Just bring up the GPO in Group …

Do you have a workstation that intermittently boots up with both the black Citrix Receiver icon and the old blue Program Neighborhood Agent/Online Plugin icon? And does it fail to launch published applications?

This is a very common problem that affects both Windows XP and Windows 7 machines. Sometimes when the …

I accidentally discovered a potential security issue with server-to-client URL redirection that affects Receiver 3.0 (ICA Client 13), ICA Client 12.1.44, and XenApp 6.

URL Redirection is often used to prevent end users from launching instances of Internet Explorer on a Citrix server and accessing the Internet. When URL …

Yes, it will work under very limited circumstances, but it is not supported by Citrix. It is officially supported only for XenApp 5 and up.

One of the problems that has plagued Citrix admins and engineers has been third party print drivers. All it takes is for one bad print driver to misbehave, crash the print spooler, and generate dozens of support calls from users who suddenly cannot print.

This common problem led to Citrix including the Citrix Universal …

In many Citrix environments it’s common to have a large variety of ICA client versions. One thing that sometimes surprises users and IT folks alike is how much of a performance increase can be seen after upgrading an old ICA client. But how do you know which clients need upgrading?

One of the biggest challenges has …