Scripting

Best Practice for the Windows Client Side Caching (CSC) kernel driver in VDI workloads

May 21, 2019

It’s been a best practice for a long time to disable Offline Files in both RDSH and VDI workloads. However, this has only ever been based around the Offline Files (CscService) service and some registry tweaks. What people don’t realize is that you must properly disable Offline Files in all VDI workloads by also disabling the […]

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Best Practice for the Windows Time (W32TIME) Service for RDSH and VDI workloads

May 16, 2019

When using image deployment mechanisms for RDSH and VDI workloads, such as Citrix PVS, Citrix MCS and VMware View Composer, it’s extremely important to reconfigure the Windows Time (w32time) Service to ensure that the LastBootUpTime is accurate. If it’s not accurate, it effects monitoring, the correlation of log data, event triggers, etc. The default Manual […]

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XDPing PowerShell Function

May 16, 2019

I wanted to write valid PowerShell function to do an XDPing the same way Citrix do with their Health Assistant tool. I was struggling a little to get the PowerShell code working as expected, so in the end I used JetBrains decompiler to decompile the VDAAssistant.Backend.dll, which is a component of the Citrix Health Assistant Tool. This […]

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Controlling the Starting of the Citrix Desktop Service (BrokerAgent)

March 4, 2019

UPDATED 31st January 2023 Added the DefaultDomainName value to the registry, which tells this script to set the Winlogon DefaultDomainName value in the registry once the autologon process has started. This allows us to use a local account for the Autologon process instead of a Domain service account, which won’t work if the Winlogon DefaultDomainName value […]

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Addressing the PowerShell Garbage Collection bug

September 25, 2017

There is a known bug where PowerShell does not correctly manage a garbage collection whilst executing a pipeline or loop of an object. Simply using [System.GC]::Collect() within the pipeline or loop does not work as expected. Memory continually grows until the pipeline or loop has completed. This becomes a serious problem if you’re script is […]

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Script to modify the defaultSecurityDescriptor attribute on the Group-Policy-Container schema class object

June 29, 2016

Last week I published an article about the changes in the behavior of Group Policy processing after the deployment of security update MS16-072 under KB3163622. It included a script to assist with the remediation of Group Policy permissions: Script to report on and remediate the Group Policy security change in MS16-072. Of course that’s not where it […]

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Script to report on and remediate the Group Policy security change in MS16-072

June 22, 2016

On June 14th 2016 Microsoft released security update MS16-072 under KB3163622 that changes the behavior of Group Policy processing so that user group policies are now retrieved by using the machine’s security context instead of the user’s security context. This is a by-design behavior change from Microsoft to protect computers from a security vulnerability. Update 23/06/2016: Microsoft […]

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Script to Import and Bind a Certificate to the Default Web Site

January 4, 2015

This Powershell script will import and bind a certificate to the Default Web Site. I use this script for Citrix StoreFront and Director deployments, but it’s written to be very flexible and versatile so can be used for other tasks. The original idea came from scripts written by Thomas Albaek and Jerome Quief for Citrix StoreFront. The way I’ve written […]

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Script to Change the Drive Letter of all CDROM and DVD Drives

January 4, 2015

This PowerShell script will change the drive letter of all CDROM & DVD Drives found starting from whatever is set as $LastDriveLetter variable, working backwards until it finds an available drive letter. Too many IT Pros leave CDROM/DVD Drives as the drive letter Windows assigns them when first detected, which is typically usually either D: or E:. Then […]

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Custom MDT Wizard For Network Settings

January 4, 2015

Setting a fixed IP Address during the MDT task sequences has always been ugly. It’s an area that I believe needs to be revisited by Microsoft. I don’t like the concept behind the “Apply Network Settings” task action. I don’t find it dynamic enough. In my opinion it’s too cumbersome and involved. The old “NICSettings_Definition_ENU.xml” […]

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