Create an ICA File from Storefront using PowerShell or JavaScript

Good ol' ICA File

Update 7-26-16: I created an additional PowerShell script that can utilize explict authentication vs anonymous only.  Available on Github.

Stand alone ICA files used to allow organizations a multitude of access options, such as single click web shortcuts, login scripts or simple desktop shortcuts for XenApp access as recent as 6.5. When XenApp moved to the FMA architecture the good ol' days of the stand alone ICA files were gone  Administrators can attempt to come close to the same behavior by utilizing Receiver SSO with shortcut publishing or web shortcuts created from Storefront.  While the ease of access is still "kind of" there, it's not nearly as easy and convenient as running a simple ICA file.  This situation adds complexity for both administrators and users by additional configuration challenges for administrators and additional steps for users to access the published resource.  To complicate things even further for administrators, add in some Windows XP clients with an older version of Internet Explorer 8(see notification below when launching Storefont web shortcut) or stand alone Citrix Receiver Web client without SSO or pnagent functionality and it's a difficult scenario to solve.  This post covers scripts I created for both JavaScript and PowerShell that can generate ICA files to be launched a variety of different ways.

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TL;DR: Click here to go to GitHub to download.

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  • Category: Storefront

Speed up Storefront with ASPNET.config change script

I got sick of having to manually edit Aspnet.config files to disable signature checking so Storefront would load faster.  I created a script that once run from a single storefront server will pull the list of servers in the Storefront cluster and quickly look for Aspnet.config files remotely.  If the file is found not to have the tweak it will back the file up, add the "generatePublisherEvidence" line and restart IIS.

  • Uses new Powershell modules
  • Disables .NET signature checking
  • Enables pool sockets
  • Disables netbios via WMI

NOTE: MUST BE RUN AS ADMINISTRATOR.

Download from Github

 

 

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  • Category: Storefront

Storefront HTTP redirect and rewrite for PNAGENT

From time to time I run into clients that have very old thin clients but want to make the jump to Storefront.  While Storefront does offer "Legacy PNAGENT" it only can be utilized using the base URL, which if you are using Netscaler Gateway it must be HTTPS.  This can be a problem with old thin clients since they probably won't understand the newer SSL certs that are out there since they lack the ability to update root CAs.  The only way for these devices to function is to utilize HTTP instead of HTTPS. 

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