Installing Receiver Storefront 1.2 – Standalone, single server

Citrix do love inventing new products!  Even if they then replace ones that work just fine.  Anyway, get used to the fact that Web Interface is going to be retired, because that is the way we’re now going.  Web Interface will not have any new versions – the future is StoreFront!  Or Cloud Gateway Express, I’m a little unclear – to be honest the terms seem to be used interchangeably. 

StoreFront is all new and exciting – and oddly old fashioned.  To be honest it looks oddly like Program Neighborhood!  One word of warning – it does not work at all with Citrix Presentation Server v4.0 because there is no way of disabling launch references, which were only introduced in Presentation Server 4.5.  Just an aside – this test system will be with XenApp 6.0

To be honest, Web Interface is working fine for now, except for the Chromebooks.  Chromebooks do not like Web Interface, they just claim (rightly) they have no Citrix client installed and give you the chance to download an ICA file, which (again rightly) you are informed cannot be opened in Google Docs.  You need StoreFront, and you also need to download the Receiver plug-in from the Google WebStore on your Chromebook.

So this is a quick guide to installing a standalone StoreFront server (just internal in this case, and without any 2 factor authentication) to allow a Chromebook to launch Citrix applications from XenApp.  I should really point out here that should should be just a proof of concept – any serious implementation will have at least two servers and a shared database.  I’m also going to use SQL Express which I would not recommend for live systems if you have full SQL Server available.

Preparation

Login to My Citrix and click Downloads

Choose CloudGateway from the big drop down list.

Select CloudGateway Express from the list.  The other download is the full appliance, and if you have bought that you hopefully know what you are doing!

Choose StoreFront 1.2…

Now you have your installers, prepare the target server:

Install Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1 – I’ve not tested this on Windows Server 2012.  You might want to save time by installing the Web Server role with the IIS6 management options and ASP.NET as well.

Installing IIS and a secure web site

You can skip this if you wish and go straight to SQL installation, but at this point I am going to get IIS ready. I’ve set up a CNAME record on my internal DNS server called “storefront”, pointing to the server name of this new server. This means I’ll can now use the URL http://storefront, where I see a big graphic saying IIS and wishing me welcome. 

But I want SSL too – StoreFront will have usernames and passwords going through it and really should be secure. I have a Windows Certificate Authority already set up (whose certificates will be trusted by my PCs) so this bit is easy for me. If you don’t have that (and don’t want to put it in place), you could buy a commercial SSL certificate or use a self signed one and make it trusted with Group Policy. But I would consider using SSL somehow.

In my case, I launch “Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager”, then select the server on the left, then SSL Certificates. I created a certificate request (2048-bit), generated a certificate for it on my certificate server, completed the request back on my Storefront box, then added a binding on the default website for https and using my new Certificate. Phew. Now the secure URL https://storefront gives me the nice IIS welcome screen, but with that reassuring “https” in the address bar.

  :-)

Installing SQL Server Express

Unlike the nice simple Web Interface which ran on text files, StoreFront needs a SQL database to work.  Since we are going to install in Standalone mode, the server needs to have an instance of SQL Server on it.  SQL Express 2008 R2 is fine, though SQL Server 2012 is supported as well now.  I’m running SQL Server 2008 R2 Express since I had the installer handy.  Download it (with SP1) and run.  Select “New installation…” to start.

Agree to the License terms when they come up.

On the feature Selection screen, you don’t need the Replication or SDK options. 

Leave it on Named Instance, that should work fine.

Windows Authentication should be okay when it asks about that.  Click the Data Directories tab and make them sensible.  Personally I don’t like the DB files hidden somewhere in Program Files, so I make them like this (but choose whatever you want, this really is about personal preference):

Click Next, Next, Next until it actually installs.

Installing StoreFront 1.2

Extract the installer you downloaded onto your server and run CitrixReceiverStorefront-x64.exe

Agree to .net install if needed

.

Agree to the EULA

And agree to install windows roles if you did not do this earlier and begin the installation

The product should now install ok.

Click Start > Citrix > Citrix Receiver StoreFront

Select Deploy a Single Server.  Note this is greyed out if you don’t have SQL Server running locally.

I put in the URL I previously got working – there, it was worth all the effort after all!

You then get three options: Authentication, Stores, and Receiver for Web.

The only button you can click is Create Service (for authentication), so click it.  You then get three options – here are the explanations from the Citrix Edocs site:

• User name and password : This is explicit authentication. Users enter their credentials when they access their stores.
• Domain pass-through :  This enables pass-through of domain credentials from users' devices. Users authenticate to their domain-joined Windows computers and are automatically logged on when they access their stores. In order to use this option, pass-through authentication must be enabled when Receiver for Windows is installed on users' devices.
• Pass-through from Citrix Access Gateway : With this, users authenticate to Access Gateway and are automatically logged on when they access their stores.

In my case I don’t have an Access Gateway at the moment (though as far as I can tell I am going to need one if I want to use two-factor authentication) and don’t want to use pass-through authentication, so I select User Name and Password to do simple authentication against AD. You might have different needs of course.  It then takes a while creating the service and dumps you back on the first options.  Click Create Store to… well, create the Store.  When prompted, give the store a name:

In this test, I have linked to XenApp, entering a server name and HTTP since this test farm is not using HTTPS.  As it notes, passwords will be send unencrypted.  I have a feeling the security guys are going to encourage me to use HTTPS.

Time to create a site to log into.  Click Create Site…

Lots of stuff appears under the Default Web Site in IIS and I can now go to this URL to access my store:

https://storefront/citrix/StoreWeb/

The first time you go to this it will take an age, though it does speed up.

Very nice.  You seem to get these green bubbles no matter what client you want to use.  I can see a request coming down to customise them at some point though. 

Final configuration of StoreFront

Go back to your server and go into Citrix Receiver StoreFront from the Start Menu again.  You should now see all the options, so clicking Authentication shows you the method you selected.  Feel free to change this if you have changed your mind, or to customise it (by restricting the domains for instance).

Note the option to manage Merchandising Server.  If you have a Merchandising server installed, you can enter its URL here.  If you have no idea what this is, its a virtual appliance (Citrix are obsessed with these at the moment – basically a XenServer or VMware image of a pre-configured Linux VM running an application) which can distribute and update pre-configured clients.  Its a good way to get the new Receiver client out there, which is incidentally a requirement to actually use this on a PC.

Click Stores on the left to look at the Store you created earlier.  The main thing here you might want to do is to configure the server farms which the store will connect to, by selecting Store and clicking Manage Server Farms.  I suppose if you have multiple farms (say, for testing), you might create multiple Store URLs, so the test farms were not connected to the URL your users were logging into.  Note the other options here – an option for configuring Legacy support, so old Agent style clients can connect through the StoreFront system.  You can also connect to Citrix Online and set up Remote Access, which are way beyond this little proof of concept.

Click Receiver for Web and you should see your website.  You probably only need one of these.

Troubleshooting

Just a note in case you are not getting any connections through this, look in the Event Viewer. Under Applications and Services Logs, then Citrix Delivery Services.  If there is lots of errors, panic.

Customising the graphics

You know management will ask about this. 

The jolly green bubbles graphic is here:

c:\inetpub\wwwroot\Citrix\StoreWeb\media\bg_bubbles.jpg

(obviously the path will change depending on the store name and where you based your IIS site, but something like this at least, and there will be one per store).

Feel free to either replace this entirely or to just edit it.  Here, I think this looks perfect…

Installing XenApp 6.5 Tech Preview - Part 4 – Configuring the farm

This is a test build of the new Tech Preview of XenApp 6.5 from Citrix.  In the previous parts of this guide we set up a License server, Web Interface server and built the farm’s Data Collector, establishing the farm and its data store.

In this part we’ll continue this process by configuring the Web Interface and the first published applications for the farm.  To be honest, this is all highly reminiscent of the process to configure the Web Interface and publish a simple application that was in XenApp 6.  If you’re familiar with it, you should know all this already. 

Logging onto our Web Interface box again we launch the Citrix Web Interface Management console from the Start Menu

In this we have no sites created yet, and we’re going to create one site under XenApp Web Sites (used for the web interface) and XenApp Services Sites (used for the  Receiver client to create links in the Start Menu and on the desktop.

Creating a XenApp Web Site

Right click on XenApp Web Sites and click Create Site.

I’m happy with the name of the site, but I want to just type the server name in IE for it to work, so I click “Set as the default page for the IIS zone”.  If there were multiple web interface sites, only one would want this on.

The point of authentication is simple since this is just an internal web interface site, so the default of “at web interface” should be fine.

A couple more screens of clicking Next and I can configure my new site, providing the name of the first farm server I just built.

On the Authentication Methods screen I just leave it as Explicit as I just want it to ask for a username and password.

I then restrict it to just my AD domain, choose the Full logon screen appearance (apparently it will look like this…)

The full interface gives some options to change the language and the reconnection options after logon.

Then I choose just “online” apps since I don’t stream to clients, then we’re all done with the web site creation.

After this I open a browser and go to my server, at http://xensvr02/ – it takes ages the first time and seems to be hung on “Loading…”, but it works after that and is super fast next time.  I can log in okay (since I specified my domain name earlier I don’t need to enter that as part of my username) and I am told, quite correctly, that there are no resources available.

Creating a XenApp Services Site

Back in the main console of the Web Interface, I right click XenApp Services Sites and click Create Site.  The default names are fine – interesting that Citrix still use the phrase “PNAgent” here, its been abandoned in most other places…

Next, Next, Next and configure the farm again.  You can go in again later and add multiple farms by the way.

I choose “online” applications again and click through to the end of the wizard.

Publishing the first applications

When I learn a new programming language I always write a “Hello World” app first.  When I produce a new Citrix farm I always publish Notepad first!

Log back on to the Data Collector we installed earlier.  I’ve already set up the AppCenter (the new name for the Delivery Services Console), by loading it from Administrative Tools > Citrix > Management Consoles > Citrix AppCenter and choosing to add the local computer.  You should see the new farm name under XenApp in the tree on the left.  Click Applications and it should be empty.  Right click and click Publish Application

 

Click Next and enter Notepad as the Display Name.  Click Next and the following screen is the same as on XenApp 6 – apps can still stream to server, to client, be hosted or be content or a desktop.  The default (“accessed from a server” – a tradition hosted application) is what we need

 

Click browse to find c:\windows\system32\Notepad.exe and it should fill in the command line and working directory. 

The next questions are all easy (servers to publish on – there’s only one and no Worker Groups yet, so I pick that server, then my own account to see the app).

I can now log into my Web Interface site and see a nice Notepad icon. 

When I launch it I get the expected notice that this is a technical preview license – after that, Notepad comes up – quite quickly actually…

Publishing the AppCenter

I’m not going to want to keep logging on to the Data Collector to use the AppCenter, so I publish that too.

This is the same process as before, it is “accessed from a server”, with the following target:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\Citrix Delivery Services Console\Framework\CmiLaunch.exe"

This works very nicely and I now have a published AppCenter. 

Now we have a working farm I’m going to check out some of the new features of XenApp 6.5 – more soon.

Installing XenApp 6.5 Tech Preview - Part 2 – Web Interface 5.4

Continuing my build of a demo XenApp 6.5 Tech Preview farm, I’m running through the setup of the new Web Interface, v5.4. In truth there’s nothing new in the initial phase of this setup so first I’ll have a look at what Citrix have to say on the subject.

The Citrix eDocs site for this version of the Web Interface is here: http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/web-interface-impington/wi-library-wrapper-impington.html

New Features:

Updated end user interface. The layout and color scheme for end users has been updated to help improve navigation and readability.

Session sharing for VM hosted applications. The Web Interface now supports session sharing for Virtual Machine (VM) hosted apps. This feature is only available for seamless applications and non-anonymous users.

Multiple desktop access for users. In previous versions of the Web Interface, users could only access a single instance of a desktop per desktop group. Now, users can access multiple instances of desktops in desktop groups. For more information about assigning desktops to users, see the XenDesktop version 5 documentation.

Improved smart card support for Access Gateway. Smart card authentication to the Web Interface is now compatible with more environments. The Web Interface can now accept User Principal Names (UPNs) from Access Gateway as well as the user name and domain. Additionally, the Web Interface has been updated to comply with FIPS. This new functionality can only be used with the pass-through authentication for smart card option and you must be logged on as a domain administrator. For more information about configuring smart card support for Access Gateway, see the Access Gateway documentation.

Ability to set additional default values. Administrators can configure default values for all bandwidth-related settings, such as audio quality, color depth, bandwidth profile, printer mapping, and window size.

ICA File Signing. The Web Interface digitally signs generated ICA files, to allow compatible Citrix clients and plug-ins to validate that the file originates from a trusted source.

Before we can install the Web Interface, we need the J# Redistributable, which is not installed by default. Its on the XenApp 6.5 DVD though, so run it manually from here (use the 64-bit one if this is Windows Server 2008 R2):

\Support\JSharp20_SE\vjredist64.exe

On J# is installed, run Server Manager from Administrative Tools. Right click Roles, Click Add Roles. Assuming it is not installed, select Web Server (IIS) on and click Next.

If Web Server (IIS) was already installed, select it in Server Managed (under Roles), right click and select Add Roles Services.

Leave the defaults selected, but turn on ASP.NET if not on already (agreeing to the other components turned on by this)

Then scroll down to Management Tools > IIS 6 Management Capability and turn on IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility too.

Click Next and Install to install IIS with the IIS 6 Metabase option. If you miss these components, the main Web Interface install will fail with a message telling you what you need on.
From the XenApp 6.5 installer file share, find the "Citrix Receiver and Plug-ins" folder in the root of the folder and copy it to the local drive of your new Web Interface server.
Execute \Web Interface\WebInterface.exe from the file share.

Select your language and agree to the EULA.

On the Location of Clients page, click "Copy the clients to this computer" and enter the location of the "Citrix Receiver and Plug-ins" folder you copied in earlier

Click Next and Next to install.

After Install (should only take a few seconds) leave the checkbox to Start creating sites now selected and click Finish

At this point we can’t go any further without creating the farm, so we’ll come back to the Web Interface setup in a while

Citrix Web Interface errors: Some of your resources have not been reconnected…

We had an annoying message suddenly appear this morning for all web interface users on logging in and out.  When they logged in they were told “Some of your resources have not been reconnected.  Try reconnecting to your resources again and, if the problem persists, contact your system administrator”:

And when they logged out, they were told “Some of your resources have not been logged off.  Ensure you have shut down all your active resources.  If this message does not usually appear at the end of your sessions, contact your system administrator”

Turns out the users were quite willing to contact their system administrator as well!  Repeatedly.  I especially like the way the second message assumes you might just always see this message and that this would be okay.

A bit of Googling turned up that we would get rid of this be turning off Workspace Control.  This is in the Citrix Web Interface Management console – right click your websites, select Workspace Control and uncheck the first checkbox…

This removed the message – and also the Reconnect and Disconnect buttons.  Not the end of the world, but not the intention either. 

Then I noticed in the event log on the web interface box lots of Application errors of ID 31003 and 30015.  These had messages of…

• All the Citrix XML Services configured for farm Test XenApp Farm failed to respond to this XML Service transaction.
• The Citrix XML Service at address http://xensvr01:80/scripts/wpnbr.dll [com.citrix.xml.NFuseProtocol.RequestAppData] is not able to process requests

It was just a test farm with one server which was set up in the web interface, and I was installing updates on it and rebooting repeatedly.  Every time it was unavailable the website was giving the message to users logging in and out as a farm was offline – even though none of the users would be logging into that farm.  Once the work was completed the error stopped coming up.

A good lesson that when you ignore some errors they fix themselves!

Citric online plug-in – changing the Server URL breaks shortcuts

I’ve had a strange bug reported by one of my users when I changed the Server URL her PN Agent (sorry, online plug-in!) used to connect to the farm.  She had dragged lots of shortcuts from her Start Menu to her desktop for Word, Excel, etc and now none of them worked – they came up with “The requested resource has been removed from the server”.

Which it hadn’t.

Anyway, the new and old Server URL went to the same Web Interface server and connected to the same farms, just with different options – after looking a bit closer though the capitalisation I’d given the farm names in “Server Farms” under the different Web Services sites were slightly different – same letters, just different capitals.  I made them the same and the old shortcuts all started working again.  I then went through every Web Interface site and made sure they were all the same! 

Yet another picky “feature” of Citrix…

Installing XenApp 6 – Part 4 – Web Interface

This is a 5 part guide to making a simple XenApp 6 farm.  These are the other sections:

1. Installing a server manually
2. Creating a XenApp 6 farm
3. Citrix Licensing
4. Web Interface
5. Unattended installations

This section is about installing the web interface to support Web Interface and Agent clients.  Note Program Neighborhood will not work with XenApp 6!

• Install a Windows 2008 R2 Server with .NET Framework 3.5 sp1
• Launch Server Manager and add the IIS role.  Add the Windows Authentication element and the contents of Application Development.  Also add the IIS6 Management  Compatibility section further down.

• Install the Microsoft Visual J# 2.0 redistributable.  This can be found on the XenApp 6 DVD at \support\JSharp20_SE\vjredist_64.msi
• Also from the XenApp 6 DVD, run \Web Interface\WebInterface.exe
• Choose your language, click Next and agree to the EULA.
• You will be prompted for a folder where the clients can be copied from so they can be made available on the server.  You may not want to do this, but if you do you can use the folder Citrix Receiver and Plug-ins on the server.  These will take a while to copy as they contain lots of languages, so you might want to clear out languages you don’t want first.
• Click next at the end of the install to start creating the sites.

• You can now create XenApp Web Sites (for Web Interface users) and XenApp Services Sites (for users of the Agent). 

Creating a simple Web Interface website.

• Specify the IIS Settings – you probably want to tick the checkbox for “Set as the default page for the IIS site”, assuming this will actually be the default page.  This will mean users will be able to just type the name of the server (or an alias you create in DNS) into their browser and see the login page of this website.

• For this simple guide I’ll assume this is just an internal server that is going to host a simple website to allow Citrix access. In this case, select “At Web Interface” for the point of authorisation. 

• After install, click next to configure the site.

• Enter your farm name and a list of servers from the farm.  These servers should all remain up from this point on to avoid errors for users logging on.  Try to add at least two servers if you have them.  Click Next when done.

• A very important choice is how users will log on to the farm.  Its unlikely you want to use Anonymous and if you don’t use Smart Cards, the third and forth options will not apply to you either.  The first two are the most usual – Explicit and Pass-through.  Explicit will prompt users for a username and password (and, optionally, a domain) before giving them their application shortcuts.  Pass-through will use the logged on Windows username and password to automatically authenticate.  This option is not applicable for every organisation as it may be considered a security problem (and obviously requires everyone to login using their own domain account on a domain PC, which might not be the case).  Pass-through is also quite complicated to get working and requires considerable testing.  When it works though, it is quite cool.  For simplicity, I’ve left it as just Explicit.  If you select more than one method you’ll need to decide later which is the default.

• On the next screen you can restrict the domains allowed or allow any domain.  Probably best to tie this down to a single domain if you can for security.

• Choose the layout – full or minimal.  Not a huge difference between them, especially if you are not going to put out messages on the site.

• Choose whether this site will serve Online, Offline or dual-mode applications.  Online applications are normal apps when the server and client are on the network.  Offline apps are specially prepared streamed applications created with the Profiler application.  They are downloaded to the client and can be executed when the network access is not available (at least for a time).  You need a platinum farm or individually purchased license for this functionality, so if you don’t have them, choose Online.  If you do have a Platinum farm, consider whether you want to support such apps and are intending to actually create them.  Click next and finish to complete the website setup.

• Open your browser and type in the name of the server, and you should see your new website

 

• After logon you should see any applications that you have defined for your farm for this username. 

• Note you can now right click the website in the Citrix Web Interface Management tool and further configure it.  This might include adding extra Server Farms (the web interface will seamlessly merge all the shortcuts for the different farms you specify), changing authentication methods, altering timeouts, etc.

Creating a simple XenApp Services site.

• Specify the IIS Settings again – this time there is no option to make it a default.

 

• After install, click next to configure the site.

• Enter your farm name and a list of servers from the farm.  These servers should all remain up from this point on to avoid errors for users logging on.  Try to add at least two servers if you have them.  Click Next when done.

• Again, choose whether to support offline (streamed applications downloaded to the client – platinum customers only) applications.  Click Next and finish.

• You can now right click the website in the Citrix Web Interface Management tool and further configure it.  This might include adding extra Server Farms (the web interface will seamlessly merge all the shortcuts for the different farms you specify), changing authentication methods, altering timeouts, etc. Checking that Authentication methods is set as you would like is especially important.  Note if you want to enable Content Redirection (the ability to set local file associations on PCs to point to Citrix Applications), its here – in Server Farms > Advanced.  This is a feature of Web Services sites only, not Web Interface clients.

As a final step in this configuration, you might want to consider installing more than one web interface server and joining them into a NLB cluster.  This works very well with Citrix Web Interface and provides a good way of being able to make changes without removing service – i.e. you can remove a server from a cluster, update it, add it back in and then repeat with the other cluster members.

Click here: http://zenapp.blogspot.com/2010/03/web-interface-52-on-windows-server-2008.html