Tuesday, September 11, 2012

XenApp Powershell Script to Publish Apps from CSV

As part of this Citrix migration project I am currently working on I had the necessity to publish multiple apps and the process was very time consuming and tedious. In order to accelerate and make the process more accurate I developed this script to publish apps from a CSV file. I also included some error checking/handling in the script for errors that I had encountered. Also be aware that for the icons to be correctly identified you will need to run this off the XA server that hosts the exe file with the path as per the "CommandLineExecutable" field.

The CSV file structure was setup as follows:
BrowserName,DisplayName,WorkerGroupNames,Accounts,CommandLineExecutable,WorkingDirectory,FolderPath,ClientFolder
Example App, Example, Test Worker Group, mshorrosh, C:\windows\system32\notepad.exe, c:\windows\system32\, Applications/Test, Test\


And the script....

# Load the snapins 
Add-PSSnapin citrix* -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
#import the csv file
$apps = Import-Csv C:\apps.csv
#each line in the csv
foreach($app in $apps)
{
    #test if workergroup provided exists
    try{
        $WG = Get-XAWorkerGroup $app.WorkerGroupNames -ErrorAction Stop
     } catch {
        Write-Host "Error: " $app.BrowserName " resulted in " $_.Exception.Message " please create worker group first"
        break
     }
    #trying to get the executables icon from the CommandLineExecutable
    try{
        $EncodedIconData = Get-CtxIcon $app.CommandLineExecutable -index 0
    } catch [Exception] {
        Write-Host "Error: Obtaining the icon failed: " $_.Exception.Message
    }
    #checking browsername length, found out it has a limit
    if($app.BrowserName.length -gt 36)
    {
        Write-Host "Error: BrowserName for " $app.BrowserName " length is to long, must be less than 36 characters, please correct"
    }
    else
    {
   
        $success = $FALSE
       
        #try to publish new app
        try {
       
            $NewApp = New-XAApplication  `
            -ApplicationType "ServerInstalled" `
            -EncodedIconData $EncodedIconData `
            -WorkerGroupNames $app.WorkerGroupNames `
            -BrowserName $app.BrowserName `
            -Enabled $TRUE `
            -Accounts $app.Accounts `
            -WorkingDirectory $app.WorkingDirectory `
            -CommandLineExecutable $app.CommandLineExecutable `
            -FolderPath $app.FolderPath `
            -ClientFolder $app.ClientFolder  `
            -WindowType "100%" `
            -ColorDepth Colors32Bit `
            -InstanceLimit "-1" `
            -AddToClientStartMenu $false `
            -AnonymousConnectionsAllowed $false `
            -DisplayName $app.DisplayName `
            -ErrorAction Stop
            $success = $TRUE
        } catch {
             Write-Host "Error: " $_.Exception.Message
        } finally {
            if($success)
            {
                Write-Host $app.BrowserName "added successfully."
            }
        }
       
       
    }

   
}

Friday, September 7, 2012

VBScript to rename Program Neighborhood Paths

The client I was working at had a multi-farm XenApp environment so I ended up needing a script that would run on XA 4.5 as well. This is essentially the same script I wrote in powershell translated to vbscript, edit appropriately as you need for your environment.


option explicit
Const MetaFrameWinAppObject = 3
Const MetaFrameWinFarmObject = 1
Dim aMFApp, hMFAppTemp, aMFTemp
Dim MFFarm : Set MFFarm = WScript.CreateObject ("MetaFrameCOM.MetaFrameFarm")
MFFarm.Initialize(MetaFrameWinFarmObject)
Dim mode, count, strReplace
mode = "Debug"
count = 0
Dim objECA, objAPAC, objAGLNG
Set objECA = New RegExp
Set objAPAC = New RegExp
Set objAGLNG = New RegExp
With objECA
                .Pattern = "ECA\\"
                .IgnoreCase = True
End With
With objAGLNG
                .Pattern = "AGLNG\\"
                .IgnoreCase = True
End With
With objAPAC
                .Pattern = "APAC\\"
                .IgnoreCase = True
End With
For Each aMFApp in MFFarm.Applications
Set hMFAppTemp = CreateObject("MetaFrameCOM.MetaFrameApplication")
hMFAppTemp.Initialize MetaFrameWinAppObject,aMFApp.DistinguishedName
hMFAppTemp.LoadData(True)
Set aMFTemp = hMFAppTemp.WinAppObject2
                If objAGLNG.Test(aMFTemp.PNFolder) = True Then
                                count = count + 1
                                strReplace = Replace(aMFTemp.PNFolder,"AGLNG\","")
                                If mode = "Debug" Then
                                                Wscript.Echo aMFTemp.AppName & " - old: " & aMFTemp.PNFolder & " new: " & strReplace
                                Elseif mode = "Real" Then
                                                aMFTemp.PNFolder = strReplace
                                                aMFTemp.SaveData()
                                End If   
                ElseIf objAPAC.Test(aMFTemp.PNFolder) = True Then
                                count = count + 1
                                strReplace = Replace(aMFTemp.PNFolder,"APAC\","")
                                If mode = "Debug" Then
                                                               
                                                Wscript.Echo aMFTemp.AppName & " - old: " & aMFTemp.PNFolder & " new: " & strReplace
                                Elseif mode = "Real" Then
                                                aMFTemp.PNFolder = strReplace
                                                aMFTemp.SaveData()
                                End If   
                ElseIf objECA.Test(aMFTemp.PNFolder) = True Then
                                count = count + 1
                                strReplace = Replace(aMFTemp.PNFolder,"ECA\","")
                                If mode = "Debug" Then
                                                Wscript.Echo aMFTemp.AppName & " - old: " & aMFTemp.PNFolder & " new: " & strReplace
                                Elseif mode = "Real" Then
                                                aMFTemp.PNFolder = strReplace
                                                aMFTemp.SaveData()
                                End If   
                End If
Set aMFTemp = Nothing
Set hMFAppTemp = Nothing
Next
Wscript.Echo "Total applications updated : " & count

Friday, August 31, 2012

Powershell script to rename XenApp Program Neighborhood Paths

Recently there was a organizational change in a company I was working at that required us to change all the program neighborhood paths for all the apps in the XenApp environment. The script below iterates through all the apps in the farm and examines their initial folder in the path for the "Client Folder" aka Program Neighborhood folder and removes the folder from their path. You may edit the different fields that we were inspecting for to suite changes you may need to make in your farm. This script should work for XenApp 6.0+.


Add-PSSnapin Citrix.XenApp.Commands 

$apps = Get-XAApplication
$mode = "Debug" #Change to Real to make changes
$count = 0

foreach($app in $apps)
{
                if($app.ClientFolder -match "AGLNG\\")
                {
                                $original = $app.ClientFolder
                                $temp = $original -replace "AGLNG\\", ""
                                $count +=1

                                if($mode -eq "Debug")
                                {
                                                Write-Host $app.DisplayName "would have " $original " changed to " $temp
                                               
                                }
                                elseif($mode -eq "Real")
                                {
                                                Write-Host "Changing " $app " to " $temp
                                                Set-XAApplication $app -ClientFolder $temp
                                               
                                }             

                }
                if($app.ClientFolder -match "ECA\\")
                {
                                $original = $app.ClientFolder
                                $temp = $original -replace "ECA\\", ""
                                $count +=1

                                if($mode -eq "Debug")
                                {
                                                Write-Host $app.DisplayName "would have " $original " changed to " $temp
                                               
                                }
                                elseif($mode -eq "Real")
                                {
                                                Write-Host "Changing " $app " to " $temp
                                                Set-XAApplication $app -ClientFolder $temp
                                               
                                }

                }
                if($app.ClientFolder -match "APAC\\")
                {
                                $original = $app.ClientFolder
                                $temp = $original -replace "APAC\\", ""
                                $count +=1

                                if($mode -eq "Debug")
                                {
                                                Write-Host $app.DisplayName "would have " $original " changed to " $temp
                                               
                                }
                                elseif($mode -eq "Real")
                                {
                                                Write-Host "Changing " $app " to " $temp
                                                Set-XAApplication $app -ClientFolder $temp
                                               
                                }

                }
}

Write-Host "Total of" $count "applications effected by the PN Folder change."

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Uninstall IE9 and install IE8 on Windows Server 2008 R2

I had to do this recently on a XenApp server to publish IE8 for compatibility support for legacy web apps and found out that this was not the most straight forward thing to do, however I found a really simple solution for it.

Simply go to Control Panel -> Windows Update -> Installed Updates -> and scroll down to find the IE9 update and click remove, it's as easy as that, reboot and IE8 is back.

Hope this saves someone the headache.

Monday, August 6, 2012

XenApp 6.5 Load Balancing Policies applied to specific applications

I spent some time working with XenApp 6.x's feature of application load balancing that allows you to route users based on certain filters to specific worker groups of servers. The interface is fairly simple and it that allows you to first pick how you want to filter the users, which is done by either Access Control, Client IP Address, Client Name, or User. After you've chosen your filter you simply pick the Load Balancing Policies you want to set, which is either by Worker Group Preference or Streamed App Delivery. All of this is managed via a node in AppCenter called  Load Balancing Policies. There are some benefits and some disadvantages I've found through using this feature which I will explain through my implementation scenario.

In my scenario I was working to implement a Global Office 2010 Silo distributed over 3 data centers, for this post I'll just name them worker groups DC1, DC2, and DC3 which are all servers containing office 2010. I setup the policies as follows:

Policy 1 
Name: DC1 Priority
Filter: Filter based on user, with user location based AD groups with fastest connection to DC1
Policy: Worker Group Preference, with priority in order lowest to highest DC1, DC2, DC3 (based on link speeds between the three).

Policy 2
Name: DC2 Priority
Filter: Filter based on user, with user location based AD groups with fastest connection to DC2
Policy: Worker Group Preference, with priority in order lowest to highest DC2, DC1, DC3.

Policy 3
Name: DC3 Priority
Filter: Filter based on user, with user location based AD groups with fastest connection to DC3
Policy: Worker Group Preference, with priority in order lowest to highest DC3, DC2, DC1.

After getting everything setup I quickly found out that the Application Load Balancing had no way to apply the policy to specific applications, meaning that it affected all applications that were published. So if a user's account was in a AD Group "DC1 Employees" he was subject to Policy 1 and XenApp would try to search the Office 2010 worker groups even if he was trying to run something like FireFox, this was causing applications to fail that were processing these policies. This was going to be a problem because I wanted to get away from having to publish different applications for different regions which makes administration a nightmare. Digging around on google I found this which Citrix gives mention of the idea to add a Worker Group with all the servers added at the last priority for the apps, this way if the application is not contained as part of the load balancing worker group set it will still launch where it is available. After making the "All Servers" worker group and adding that as last priority on all the LB Policies, everything was working just as planned.

Monday, June 25, 2012

One-liner to enumerate all members of an AD Group and retrieve their e-mail addresses

Here is some useful one-liners using dsquery to enumerate all the members of an AD security group and retrieve their e-mail addresses or retrieve an e-mail address from AD via a single user account. These come in handy when you need to create distribution lists for notifications or announcements. You can wrap these queries in batch scripts and pipe out to a file and import in to excel to cleanup.

dsquery group -Name <AD Group Name> | dsget group -members | dsget user -email | findstr ".com" > output.txt

Also to retrieve e-mail addresses from single users use the following:

dsquery user -samid <username> | dsget user -email | findstr ".com" > output-user.txt

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

VBScript to Enumerate Installed Applications and Versions

Here is a script I wrote to discover the installed application versions across a list of servers. I have it formatted so it will export a csv file with the information. Note: I also wrote some conditional statements to exclude some Windows update patches/hotfixes/security updates, etc.

To use: "cscript script.vbs" and will generate a results.csv file, also provide a ServerList.txt filled with the list of servers (by line) which you wish to scan the applications and their version numbers.

Here it is:

Dim args,computername, count
count = 0
Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objFile1 = objFSO.OpenTextFile("ServerList.txt", ForReading)
Const ForReading = 1
'Read Compare To List
Dim ListToProcess()
i = 0
Do Until objFile1.AtEndOfStream
Redim Preserve ListToProcess(i)
ListToProcess(i) = objFile1.ReadLine
i = i + 1
Loop
objFile1.Close
For Each strLine in ListToProcess
 if strLine <> "" then
 computername = strLine
 Call enumApps(strLine,1)
 End if
Next

Function enumApps(computername,flag)
On Error Resume Next
Dim strComputer, strLine

strComputer = computername
Const HKLM        = &H80000002
Const strKeyPath  = "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall"
Wscript.echo "===============" & "Parsing " & computername & "==============="
Dim oReg, arrSubKeys, strProduct, strDisplayName, strVersion
Set oReg = GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" &  strComputer & "\root\default:StdRegProv")
oReg.EnumKey HKLM, strKeyPath, arrSubKeys
For Each strProduct In arrSubKeys
    oReg.GetStringValue HKLM, strKeyPath & "\" & strProduct, "DisplayName", strDisplayName
    oReg.GetStringValue HKLM, strKeyPath & "\" & strProduct, "DisplayVersion", strVersion

 Dim Filter
 If InStr(1, strDisplayName, "", vbTextCompare) > 0 Then
  If InStr(1, strDisplayName, "Security", vbTextCompare) = 0 Then
   If InStr(1, strDisplayName, "Update", vbTextCompare) = 0 Then
    If InStr(1, strDisplayName, "Hotfix", vbTextCompare) = 0 Then
     strVersion = Replace(strVersion, ",", "")
     strLine = strLine & strDisplayName & "," & strVersion & "," & strComputer & vbCrLf
     'Wscript.echo strLine
    End If
   End If
  End If
 End If


Next

Dim ObjFso
Dim StrFileName
Dim ObjFile
StrFileName = "results.csv"
Set ObjFso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
'Opening the file
Set ObjFile = ObjFso.OpenTextFile (StrFileName, 8, True)
If count = 0 then
 objFile.WriteLine "Application Name, Version,Server"
 count = 1
end if
objFile.WriteLine strLine
objFile.Close
End Function