Getting rid of a Explorer folder problem

By Max Ranzau

From the Hexbags and Spells Dept. One really annoying explorer behavior which seems to recently have been making its rounds on Win7 x64, is an error which typically appears when you either drag and drop move things around in desktop folders or just create a folder somewhere using explorer. The errormessage which often comes out of the blue is “Could not find this item” <new line> “This is no longer located in <path>. Verify the item’s location and try again.” This addition to the Technote Library shows you how to defeat it with RES Automation Manager and as usual a BuildingBlock is included

<<< Click here to read the technote

Defeating a live virus/trojan infection with AM

By Max Ranzau

From the Crush, Kill & Destroy Dept. This is an aricle about using RES Automation Manager to defeat a live virus infection and cleaning up the colatteral damage afterwards, in case you’re dealing with many computers. With the help of others, I’ve put together a solution, as well as providing some valuable generic takeaways, like how to change special permissions in the registry and how to use the Windows PendingFileRenameOperations queue from within Automation Manager.

<<< Click here to read the article.

New Tool: GPO to RES Converter

From the Community Hero Dept. One of the things I state over and over, is that we're our own worst critics here at RES Software. While this is good thing, yammering about stuff, is one way of getting things changed. Another approach is actually DOING something about it yourself. This is the reason why I want to highlight a really nice tool, called ImportGPO – which my good friend and colleague, Dennis Raemakers has developed on his own. Today I'm proud to be able share it with the RES community at large:

The ability to read the given configuration information stored in GPO's and import it into the RES Workspace Manager, has been a long sought after feature. This is exactly what this tool does and a bit more! While there are other tools out there, such as the previously covered VEToolkit, which does similar – the more tools of this kind enriches the RES community resource pool. Either way, the advantage of exporting the GPO's themselves is that they contain the whole picture, not just the resulting set o settings being applied via the .POL files. The ImportGPO utility works like this:

1. First go to a Win7/2008 box and start your Group Policy Management Console, for example by running GPMC.MSC
2. Now navigate to the policy which you want to convert. Go to the Settings tab
3. Rightclick and chose "Save Report.."
4. Chose to save the report as .XML format (not .TXT) This is important.

Just do it like shown above on the right, where I've used the Domain Default policy as an example.

Once you got the XML export of the given GPO, it's time to fire up the ImportGPO utility, which can be downloaded further down.

In the tool, you want to use the Import XML file button on the right and get the report you've just created into the tool. Once imported, there is a couple of things to know about what you're looking at. All settings in RED are disabled settings. With the checkboxes at the bottom of the screen you can chose to hide disabled settings. You can also decide not to export disabled settings. You might also see some settings appearing in BLUE. These are HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE based settings. The tool will export both HKCU and HKLM settings as seperate .reg files, which you now can import respectively into Workspace Manager and RES Automation Manager.

The tool also supports GPO's for Folder Redirection. This means if you have a policy which specifies that some shellfolders (such as Desktop or MyDocuments) should be living somewhere else, you can export this to a BuildingBlock that will import directly into the Folder Redirection node of Workspace Manager 2012 (yes, only this version and up). If you import a GPO file which contains any folder redirections, an asterix (*) will flash on each side of the Folder Redirection tab in the tool. All you need to do is go there and select which shellfolder redirections you want to include.

One important thing is the checkbox to enable the Folder Redirection node at the bottom of the tab. Enabeling this box, will instruct Workspace Manager to turn on the Folder Redirection feature under Composition | Actions by Type | File and Folders | Folder Redirection when you import the BuildingBlock. Only do this when you are absolutely sure the paths are valid and sound, otherwise first review the redirection paths in the Workspace Manager console. Also, if you uncheck a given redirection policy, it will still be exported to the BuildingBlock, but will be disabled per default. This concludes the walkthrough of the ImportGPO tool.

Download the ImportGPO v0.3 tool here – This package contains a couple of sample GPO xml exports as well, one for some generic HKCU based settings, and one that contains folder redirection settings.

This is a tool in development and provided as-is. There is good things to come – Stay tuned! If you have ideas or feedback to Dennis on the ImportGPO tool in the meantime, feel free to comment below.

Enjoy!

New technote: Parsing files with AM

From the TechNote Dept: A new article by Patrick Kaak has been posted in the TechLibrary. This time around Patrick shows us the advantages of incorporating existing scripts into RES Automation Manager, illustrating by example how an otherwise semi-static script can be converted into a reusable runbook, which requires no editing what so ever. The example at hand utilizes Thomas Koetzing’s excellent Citrix Hotfix downloader script. By embedding it into an AM runbook you don’t have to ever edit it again. As usual for your convenience, an example buildingblock is included

<<< Click here to read the article

Vat are you Syncing about?

From the Mayday-We’re-Syncing Dept. On the last day of 2011, the Service Release 3 for the RES Workspace Manager 2011 was released. Among a bunch of new cool enhancements, there is one that I especially would like to elaborate on. Workspace Manager supports Microsoft Sync Center, a part of Windows 7. Specifically the support consists of that network drive-mappings, created in Workspace Manager will continue to work nicely, when Sync Center is used to bring stuff offline. This means you don’t have to worry about scripts to map the network drive when you’re offline. A new technote RG044 has been added to the Technote Library describing how this works. A helpful buildingblock has been included.

<<< Click here to read the article

The Ultimate Citrix BuildingBlock

‘Twas a month before Xmas and through the hotel, nothing was stirring… well maybe, except for the 450+ geeks and guru’s who assembled at the Hilton Universal City, Los Angeles for the first major Citrix Technology Exchange event on Dec 2nd 2012. RES Software had been invited as a platinum sponsor of the event. Besides showing our products at the vendor’s tables, we also had a couple of presentation slots. I want to take a moment to specially thank my friend Rick Eilenberger at Citrix for putting this great event together. Be sure to check out his follow-up article here.

During one of the RES Software presentations, I had the pleasure of once again demonstrating the unparalleled awesomeness of the RES Automation Manager. This time I had the good Mr. Luca Lo Castro with me on stage, as he is indeed the evil mastermind behind this latest creation. What we have here is nothing less than one of the most awesome Run Books created for RES Automation Manager yet.  Read more »

Grabbing everything Explorer does

From the So-Ein-Ding-Muss-Ich-Auch-Haben Department. Here the other day I came across a nice article by Michel Stevelmans, where he’s taken the time to dig out some really useful explorer registry keys. These are the settings one needs to pick up from the users registry in order to serve up a consistent desktop experience, when moving across a computing estate. While the article was written with a competing vendor in mind, I have the luxury of really not having to care about that. This article will show you how to to put this knowledge into practice with RES Workspace Manager – and yes, you guessed it: BuildingBlock Included!

<<< Click here to read the full article

XenApp 6.5 BuildingBlock for Automation Manager

From the Gold-Brick-Through-Your-Window Dept. A while back you may have read about the work that was initiated at the Citrix Servtech event in Santa Clara, CA. As it turns out RES Software and Citrix Systems found a lot of common ground in leveraging the power of the RES Automation Manager to speed up Citrix XenApp 6.5 deployments.

IMPORTANT: The buildingblock has been updated Dec 5th. See below.

There is good reason to look into automating XA6.5 installations: You may not have noticed it, but the end-of-life date for XenApp 6.0 was recently updated. In other words, within the coming year you may need to start thinking about upgrading your XenApp farms. To ease this transition, it is my pleasure already now to be able to share with you the fruits of the collaboration between Citrix and RES. You can download the building block for Automation Manager at the end of this post.

A few words about the building block: It contains a Run Book which will schedule several Modules, necessary to install and configure XenApp 6.5 – including it’s prerequisites. To try it out, you need to download and install the RES Automation Manager. You can pull down a fully functional 45-day eval copy here. Getting-Started guide is available here. Out of the box there will be enough licenses to install a handful of XenApp servers. You will also need your XenApp 6.5 ISO image handy. You will either mount the image somewhere or extract the contents to a folder. Either way, the buildingblock requires the contents of the ISO to be accessible via a share. This is important. Once you schedule the Run Book, you will be prompted to enter some information such as paths, passwords, etc. See the screenshot on the right for an example.

Those of you who are savy AM hackers may wonder what’s up with the share. As it turns out, it’s really the most efficient way to access the Citrix distribution media, simply because of it’s size, it’s not feasible to upload as a AM Resource. Second, bear in mind that the ISO contents may be updated by Citrix in the future.

I wish to personally thank the following people for their contributions to this project: Rick Eilenberger, Josh Fleming, Alex Danilychev and Brian Mirrotto @ Citrix Systems. And last but not least my fearless Sicilian friend Luca Lo Castro here at RES, who put the pieces together into a working building block. Credit also goes to Musa Cakar and Arno Vos, who took the time to expand the datastore capabilities. See below:

As mentioned, the buildingblock was updated December 5th 2011. The update consists of support of MS SQL Datastores. While the original buildingblock only supported SQLserver 2008, it now supports creating the XenApp Datastore on MSSQL 2005 and 2012 (Release Candidate 0).

Click here to download the updated XenApp 6.5 block:

New AM buildingblock: Lock keyboard and Mouse

From the BuildingBlock dept. I’ve posted a new buildingblock in the Automation Manager section. This BB is based on some original work by Jeroen Speetjens who shared it with us a while back (Cheers mate!). This building block contains one single module, which can both disable or enable mouse and keyboard on a target computer. This is great for situations where you want users to keep their hands completely off the computers until you’re done with them. Read more »

Presenting the VEToolkit

From the RES Community Hero dept. My good friend Iain Brighton over at Virtual Engine in the UK has for quite some time offered a pretty amazing toolkit which will help you in your daily work with RES Workspace Manager. It’s about time I gave it a proper review. The VEToolkit is to the RES Workspace Manager what Robin is to Batman! It’s a great sidekick as it picks up where WM leaves off by offering multiple functions, which are all triggered by the green button in the lower right of the app.

This application is in continued development (beta 3) at the time of writing. In this article I’ll give you a detailed introduction to it’s capabilities along with usecases and show you where to download. I should probably also mention the VEToolkit is free! Interested? Read more »