05/7/12

Publish an Application to the Citrix XenApp Web Interface

Figured I’d keep with the theme of my last blog and make this another little how to. Most people who have Citrix XenApp and APP-V in their environment would be aware of the Citrix APP-V Integration kit which leverages a Conduit file to publish APP-V sequenced applications through the Citrix receiver. That’s pretty well detailed on the Citrix site:

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX126082

There’s also a very easy way to publish your APP-V applications via the XenApp Web Interface.  Why would you want to do this? Well maybe you have home users that are on Thin Client machines and only access through the XenApp Web Environment. Rather than publish a desktop with all your applications you may want to make some applications available via the Web UI. To do this your requirements will be:

Citrix Terminal Server

APP-V Client for Terminal Server (RDS)

Citrix XenApp

A sequenced APP-V application.

So you will be required to setup the APP-V Client on your Terminal Server first. This means getting your hands on the TS version of APP-V. Note that the client with the MDOP DVD is not the one you need to do this, you will have to get on the iso file from the Microsoft site. Once you have the Client it’s as simple as setting it up to meet your own requirements. If you do not know how to do this I suggest getting familiar with the Client as it’s the main component for APP-V. I would suggest checking out Tim Mangan from my Blogroll on the right side of the screen. He wrote a great book all about the client. Once you have the Client up and running you should import your application into the APP-V Management Console and stream it to the Terminal Server( Go on the TS and refresh the publishing server). For more information on importing your application into the Management console for streaming see my previouos blog post: Here

Once you’ve verified the application works on the server you are ready to publish to the XenApp Web Interface. This is pretty simple, go to your Citrix Management Console. Browse to your server of choice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Under your applications, right click and select Add New Application. You will go through the same old Publishing Application wizard with a couple of key differences to be aware of. You will not be browsing to your application under the Install Directory like you would for a regular application. What you will need to do is browse to the server you streamed your application to and then select the sfttray.exe under C:\Program Files\Microsoft Application Virtualization Client. You will then need to pass a few arguments/parameters to launch the application you want e.g. /hide /launch “Application” [%*]

/hide /launch launches the application with hiding the loading

“Application” will be whatever appears in your NAME tag within your applications OSD file

[%*] passes the WorkingDir from your applications OSD. Note if your OSD doesn’t have a WorkingDir populated you should not put this in or your application will fail to launch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can set your shortcuts icon to whatever folder you prefer and use whatever icon you’d like. I just pick the icon which is located with my APP-V application in the icons folder

 

 

 

 

You will also need to assign the application to an AD group, this may or may not be the same AD Group you used when assigning the APP-V application to the users. If it is not the same you should remember that you need to assign the application to the correct groups. If you assign the application through Citrix Management Console but not through the APP-V Management console the application will fail to launch. You should also be aware that when you are selecting what servers to allow the application run on, you should ensure whatever servers you pick have the APP-V Client installed and have had the application streamed to that server before publishing the app via the Citrix Management Console.

05/1/12

Installing an Enteo Package via Command Line

This one is just a little How to. I couldn’t find this online when I needed to find it. Enteo seems to be popular mostly in German speaking countries and originates from Germany. So a lot of the forum sites and documentation I could find was in German. To make matters worse, Enteo has undergone huge transformations in recent years and the commands I found actually didn’t work in the version I had but did in a slightly older version. So before you read on, note that this is only applicable to version 6 as far as I’m aware.

So the command is:

NiInst32.exe /Execute:MDSID:PolicyInstance.%InternalID%

e.g. NiInst32.exe /Execute:MDSID:PolicyInstance.14176

%InternalID% is the Internal ID generated for the software policy of the application you need to install. So for my work what I did was setup a Machine, install the client on that machine/Add the machine into Enteo and then add the application I want to deploy into Enteo and “Assign” the app to my machine. Once that is done the application will appear in your machines software policies with an amber icon to show it is assigned but not yet installed. So either you can restart the machine or wait for the next set refresh and allow the application to automatically install or you can force the application to install via the above command.

That should be all you need. I might elaborate a bit more on what I’m using this for myself in a few months but for now I’m just putting this out there for anyone else using version 6 .

04/17/12

AGPM Setup Issues

I have setup Advanced Group Policy Management twice over the last 3 years. It is quite a useful tool for Administrators giving the ability to track GPO updates; who changed them, what did they change, when was it changed etc. It also allows you the ability to roll back the changes if you get complaints from users that something broke after the updates had been rolled out. The previous times I set this up, I didn’t have any issues, it was a very straight forward setup and simple to follow. This time however, I hit a few issues. I must admit, I hit these issues because of my own assumptions, when you work in Software Management and go through hundreds of installs a month, you learn how a lot of installers act or should act. So this is why I didn’t figure out this first issue right away.

During the install of the server piece, you get prompted to provide a service account which must have access to modify GPO settings, fair enough, that makes sense. Now, I was logged into the server as myself which I’d imagine most of you would be too. I wanted to input an account here that differed to mine and was more of a service account. So I input my username e.g. Domain\GPOServ and my passwords. Hit next and assume since it went to the next screen what I inputted was correct but as I later discovered the password does not get verified. So if you don’t get it right during the install you won’t know until it fails on you. I don’t understand why anybody thought that was a good idea especially when other installers use something similar and do perform the validation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I thought that was my only issue but what I neglected to realize, that even though the installer gives you the option to select a different user account to the one you are logged in as, the account you pick must have have full permissions to the AGPM archive folder which is created during the install!!!

If you wanted you could create the folder beforehand and grant the correct permissions manually but what I ended up doing was logging in as the service account and performing the install.

That’s not the end of it unfortunately. I kept receiving an error:

Windows Installer installed the product. Product Name: Microsoft Advanced Group Policy Management – Server. Product Version: 3.0. Product Language: 1033. Installation success or error status: 1603.

So for this one, basically even though I had my firewall switched off, the installer was failing because it could not set the firewall exception. I even had unchecked the option to add the exception. When I started the firewall service and ran the install again it completed the install. So the install must be calling the firewall, causing the issue. It kept me busy for a while, I hope this little run down helps anybody that might be seeing the same issues.

Any other time I set this up the environment had Windows Firewall enabled. So it will be interesting to see if the client works properly now that I’ve disabled the firewall again. I assume it should and this was just a case of a bad installer. Let’s See eh!?