Christos Polydorou

We started a Citrix XenDesktop 7.1 installation today and I was the person responsible for the Citrix NetScaler appliances. In that case I had to setup two NetScaler VPX 10 appliances as a High Availability pair, load balance Storefront servers and DDCs and publish the applications and desktops using NetScaler Gateway. I started by downloading the appropriate VM for Hyper-V, created a VM using the vhd (I could not import the VM in Hyper-V 2012 R2 because it was exported from older version of Hyper-V) and then created a clone for the second node. I assigned IP addresses, uploaded license files and created an initial checkpoint of the VMs. I didn't update the firmware cause it was already at the latest version. After that I created the servers for the StoreFront and DDCs and then the Service Groups and the Services on each group. I also load balanced the company's Active Directory servers for the authentication. Then I created the virtual servers, the monitors and the ...

After using dirsync for a few months now in order to sync the on premises Active Directory with the Windows Azure Active Directory for our company's Office 365 subscription, I got a very strange error today. A user reported that she could not log in to her mailbox via Micosoft Outlook so the first thing I did was to check the ForeFront Synchronization Service Manager logs to see if there is something wrong with the password sync process. On the Windows Azure Active Directory Connector there was the message "stopped-extension-dll-exception". The first thing that came to my mind was, OK some update broke the whole thing. I decided to take a look at the Application log in case there's something there that could help, and it was. There were several events stating that there is a error connecting to the authentication service. I searched the web for a bit and there were some people that suggested to check the Azure account used for the process for expired password. I...

Upgraded a NetScaler HA pair yesterday, following the official procedure, and everything seemed to be working fine. All services were up, all monitors were fine too. When I tried to take a look on a Virtual Server properties though, I got an error stating that the GUI version that I currently have (124.x) is not compatible with the kernel I'm using (125.8). The message also suggested that I flushed the Java cache, which I have disabled. I gave it a try with other browsers but the result was the same. After googling around for a bit I found out that the problem is caused by a custom theme I have setup on one of my Access Gateway Virtual Servers. I switched the theme setting to Green Bubble and everything works fine now. The bad thing is that I may have to build the custom theme from scratch...

I was asked today to install Google Earth 7.1 on several computers. Since I had deployed the previous version using GPO I though I would give it a try. I downloaded the Google Earth custom installer (left Auto update unchecked) and started the installation. The installer extracts all files in a directory in the %temp% folder so when the extraction is complete go and copy that folder to your desktop. After that, start the administrative install with the command: msiexec -a "Google Earth.msi" When it asks you for a path, enter the network location where you want to have the installation files. Now, when you try to add a package to your group policy object it may fail with an error like the following: "Unable to extract deployment information from the package. Run validation on the package to ensure that the package is correct." In that case fire up orca from the Microsoft Windows SDK, open the msi file on the network location and remove all language codes except 1...

I wanted to do a POC the other day for a company for the Citrix CloudBridge appliances. I wanted to emulate the satellite connection between the data center and the ships and demonstrate the use of CloudbBridge. After googling around for a bit I stumbled upon  WANem , a linux project that emulates wan connections. I downloaded a copy and fired up a Hyper-V virtual machine using the iso file. I also made a clone of a windows 7 virtual machine that I already had and created a new virtual switch on Hyper-V. I also added two legacy network adapters on the WANem virtual machine because it did not recognize the normal ones. After all virtual machines booted up I had to configure the network settings on all of them. I decided to use the network 10.0.0.0/24 for the data center part and 10.0.1.0/24 for the ship part. After I configured the network on the wanem machine with the appropriate addresses I was time to configure the windows machines. I assigned the proper IPs and set th...

I was trying to update Brackets today on my machines. The installation of the new package run smoothly on my Windows 7 32bit computer but not so much on the Windows 8.1 x64 computer. After clicking the msi file I got the error that the installation directory (c:\program files (x86)\brackets) has to be on a local drive, which apparently is... I checked the md5 hash of the file and it was fine. After that, I fired up a powershell prompt and changed to the directory of the installation file. I invoked the file and the installation started and there was no error during the process!

You can always create a self signed certificate using makecert utility that is part of either Visual Studio Tools or Windows SDK. You may find more information on makecert here . I just started the Developer Command Prompt for VS2013, changed to my Desktop and then executed the following command: makecert -sky exchange -r -n "CN=CertificateName" -pe -a sha1 -len 2048 -ss My "CertificateName.cer"  You should replace the "CertificateName" with the name you want for your certificate. I gave it "WindowsAzureManagement". After that you'll have a certificate file on your desktop folder and a new certificate installed under the Personal folder on your User Certificate Store. When you try to add a new Azure Subscription in Visual Studio 2013, through "Manage your subscriptions", you have the new certificate available for the first step. You will also need the certifate file the above command created because you have to uploa...