Vision app for remote desktops.

Up until recently if i needed to open a remote desktop to a server i was using the microsoft remote desktops tool. As with all microsoft “value-add” products. It was Clunky, awkward and very buggy.

I often found that it would crash for no reason, the credentials even when explicitly defined wouldnt work, when disconnected and reconnecting to a session it was a game of chance whether you actually got your old session back and there was no way of telling which server you were logged into at a glance without actually clicking each server icon.

When i started in here a few months ago, i received a copy of VisionApp VRD and i havent once looked back. It has all the features the windows version should have. You can organise your servers by Groups, Set multiple credentials, View what servers you are logged into and best yet it doesnt crash!

Give it a whirl if you need software of this type, its freeware afterall

how do i create custom .adm / group policy files?

Update: With thanks to some great help and troubleshooting from Steven we have resolvedthe line 46 “Categor” error. In order for the adm to parse the ending y in this file an additional two blank lines or “carriage returns” are neccessary at the base of the adm file. The download file has been updated, Thanks again Steven.

A .adm file, is a group policy file that specifies policies outside of microsoft’s default options. Basically they are policies you can put in place that microsoft in their infinite wisdom forgot to put in before launch.

I had a situation recently where we have external users coming into our network, and using our CAG’s to access the the citrix environment. Once in there they needed access to an internal webpage that we published with internet explorer. The problem therein lied that these users could browse the local lan for resources with the address bar and many other wonderful utilities Microsoft put into internet explorer but failed to lock down efficiently.

All i really cared about (and for the interest of this post) was locking down the address bar in Internet Explorer 6.1. Nowhere could i find an option to do this, and i was getting nowhere fast. Searching internet explorer did bring back a few “helpful” articles on technet that i just couldnt understand, and i did find a piece of software that used to do it for free, until microsoft bought the company, stole its code for server 2008 and stopped people using or downloading the application. nice one microsoft…

I have attached the policy settings and ADM files for reference on how to lock down internet explorer 6 completely, hopefully i will save somebody else 7 hours of their time.

Deleting Files older than X, Forfiles.exe.

As part of my recent Citrix cleanup i found the need to clear down an applications log files folder, this folder existed in the program files directory and was eating up gb’s of space with useless logs. The only difference between these files and standard logs was that sometimes recovery was neccessary so it was agreed that a 7 day retention would be kept.

With the 7 day retention it made it slightly more complicated to batch, but with a little searching and trial/error i present to you forfiles. As far as I’m aware this program comes with server 2003 tools, but could be wrong. a bit of googling will find you a copy.

Forfiles allows you to execute individual commands for files that meet certain criteria, in my case it was the Date index. Not only this but it allows for & commands… excellent little batch tool!

forfiles -d -8 -c “cmd /c echo Deleted: @file @fdate >> %apath% & del @file”

Slow login to Citrix After Fix# 157025

If you, alike us installed the latest Citrix patches due to the high security vulnerability on the local network, then you too were up the creak after the scheduled reboot.

It seems the latest patch they rolled out changes the default authentication method to default windows authentication which completely screws the login process to the tune of 60′ish seconds. notepad on the affected servers was taking over 1 minute to open… notepad?

Full info can be found here: But if like me and you are a little reluctant to install another bodged patch, after the jump is a work around.

Saying for the day.

It made me laugh:

Tech support: it is picking up the phone and then being bukkaked by stupid.

How nice