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Jeremy Saunders Updated 8th December 2008…
Today I was finalising the application deployment for a new XenApp farm. One of the final scripts to create was to place 9 shortcuts on the Desktop of the All Users profile. That’s quite a simple task, and for the most part some would probably just end up copying a bunch of previously created ones into place. But that would be too easy. I wanted to create them on the fly!
So whilst I was writing the script I was faced with three challenges:
How can I detect if a Windows 2003/2008 server is configured for Remote Administration or running the Terminal Server role/service?
Updated 19th October 2010…
This is what I call the “bees knees” of scripts for deploying VMware Tools. It will detect if it’s being installed on a Terminal/Citrix Server, and remove the appropriate components that may impede performance, etc.
The methodology I use for deploying and managing Citrix XenApp solutions has proven very successful over the years.
To maintain a homogeneous environment conducive to stability, utilisation of a well-defined and automated server build process is a best practice. Automated server builds can save countless hours when deploying new servers, rebuilding a problematic one, or addressing test requirements. A server build process is based on building servers from initial hardware configuration through to application installation and configuration. In most of my cases this is heavily used for Citrix XenApp rollouts.
Alan Cuthbertson over at SysPro Software used his ADM Template Editor to convert the Microsoft Office 2003 ADM’s to the new ADMX format.
Alan posted some interesting notes…
The guys over at Virtual Software have just released a neat little tool called ThinApp Editor. “ThinApp Editor is an easy to use editing tool for VMware’s ThinApp capture files.” Very nice!
Following on from my previous article titled “How to pick a good Consultant/Integrator to Partner with?“, I believe that this project cartoon describes the challenges of communicating and executing customer requirements, and is very relevant to what I see a lot of in the IT & T industry.
Like most IT professionals, I’ve been using Bginfo to embed some useful information in the wallpaper of a users Desktop for some years now. So what you say! Well…not too long ago Warren Simondson of CTRL-ALT-DEL IT Consultancy created a couple of cool utilities called TSBackdrop and PCBackdrop. I was specifically interested in the TSBackdrop utility, as it automatically displays items such as the Client Computer Name, Client IP address, Username and the Server which the Client is logged on to, on the user’s desktop background. This is great for Terminal and Citrix servers, and something that Bginfo lacks.
Got this e-mail today from virtualizationuniversity.com. Some colleagues and customers may find it of value…
I was driven to write this script for a client that was using Novell’s iPrint. iPrint was causing some threads to hang, ending the spoolsv.exe process, and therefore stopping the Print Spooler service. Those of you that are using such poor printing solutions would no doubt have clocked up a considerable number of headaches. The good news is that this script will provide you with some much deserved pain relief. Let’s call it the “Asprin for iPrint”. I’ll have to register a trade mark for that one 😉
So why is this script so good? Glad you asked!
