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 …