New Blog By sepago

Thorsten Christoffers, working with sepago as well, has recently started his own blog. I value Thorsten very much as a colleague and an expert in technologies related with Microsoft Windows Server Systems and Microsoft System Center. Please give him a warm welcome by navigating over to his blog (which is written in German), taking in the first content and returning in the future for new articles.

Preserving Windows Explorer Folder Views in Roaming Profiles

A user environment usually includes one or more network drives used to store data and exchange documents. Over time many different types of files are located on these shares and many make use of different views for individual folders (details, list, small and large symbols to name a few) to present the contained files in the most appropriate way. But due to the design of roaming profiles, Microsoft has decided to not preserve these folder views in most situations.

User Profile Whitepaper for Citrix User Profile Manager 2.0

I am proud to announce the availability of the user profile whitepaper for Citrix User Profile Manager (UPM) 2.0. It has been a lot of new and updated content to reflect the changes in UPM 2.0 compared to the Tech Preview.

sepago Community Tools

A couple of hours ago, sepago started the Community Tools blog as a publishing platform for freely available tools. So far it contains the tools which I and my colleague Helge Klein have published in the past. New tools by other co-workers will be made available there. The first addition is Profile Nurse developed by two colleagues. Helge has written a detailed announcement. Enjoy this site and the future content.

Reading Farm Information from the XML Service

After writing and publishing the XmlServiceExplorer, I was asked several times just how much information is disclosed by the XML service. There were also comments (in Brian’s forums) about a possible security breach caused by offering the access lists of all published applications which I described in a tutorial to the XmlServiceExplorer. Although it is possible to suppress the access lists being disclosed by the XML service, the switch is not documented.

Pausing (not Suspending) Virtual Machines to Preserve Resources

When working with several virtual machines on my laptop, I often run into situations when system resources become scare. The most obvious bottleneck is physical memory. And despite the efforts of the desktop virtualization vendors to reduce the amount of physical memory required, this happens very frequently and results in heavy swapping while Windows attempts to resolve the issue. This causes a lot of stress on the local hard drive causing Windows to perform even worse.

The Necessity of Managing User Profiles

I have recently had the chance to write an article for a German journal called LANline. The article focuses on user profile management and why modern approaches of application delivery create the need for a user profile management solution.

The article can be read in the printed issue published in October 2008. Please note that this article is written in German.

XmlServiceExplorer

This tool offers a graphical user interface to build requests to be sent to the XML service. The response is displayed for inspection. Thus, the XmlServiceExplorer allows administrators to debug how the XML service works and what kind of information is passed to Web Interface.

Where is my XenApp 5.0 for Windows Server 2003?

A couple of weeks ago, Citrix released XenApp 5.0 to the web. Rest assured, I was really eager to be one of the first to download this new major release and immediately set up a new box with it. Of course, I wanted to know how the RTW compares to the Early Release of Project Delaware which I wrote about in Delaware Test Drive.

Suppressing Access Lists to be Exposed by the XML Service

In an earlier article about the XmlServiceExplorer, I explained how to obtain the access list of all published applications in a farm from the XML service.

As this information is offered without authentication, it can be considered a security issue. The XML service should rather offer the resulting list of published applications based on the access lists instead of the access list themselves.

Fortunately, this behaviour of the XML service can be suppressed by changing a registry key on the Presentation Server / XenApp server: