Creating user customizable announcements for NetScaler Access Gateway

A customer would like to designate a number of people for customizing announcements on the Access Gateway Enterprise page.  This way the organization can announce important changes, planned downtime or other announcements. The advantage of this is that a network engineer does not need to be bothered for displaying all sorts of messages on the Access Gateway by fiddling with the files on the appliances.

[BUG] ERROR: Feature(s) not licensed [AAA]

This week I was implementing a pair of Citrix NetScaler Standard Edition appliances, mostly to be used for Access Gateway features. As always I started of with the latest Citrix NetScaler firmware which is 73.5 as of this writing. I was configuring Pre-Authentication Policies within GUI, later on I was testing HA failover and noticed that the Pre-Authentication policies were missing after doing a HA Failover.

Contributing to Citrix Education

Last week I was off to Citrix Systems, Santa Clara for attending the next Citrix NetScaler-based CCA exams IDW (Item Development Workshop). An IDW is a workshop that lasts about a week in which you and others will create exam questions (or items) that will appear on the next (or revised) Citrix exam(s). In this particular IDW we are concentrating on the follow-up exams of the old Citrix NetScaler 1Y0-A11 and Citrix Access Gateway Enterprise 1Y0-A13 which are based on the Citrix NetScaler 9 software version.

Unfortunately we forgot to take a picture of all the participants together, so to name a few: from left to right: Lourdes Soler (Citrix), Henny Louwers, Stuart Souter, Alejandra Garcia (Citrix), Craig Pickford and Robert Zehnder.

Installing Citrix NetScaler VPX into VMware Workstation

I hope I don’t need to explain that this is for testing/evaluating purposes only and is not at all supported by Citrix in any way.  The reason for me to create this how-to is because I am stumbling on a lot of forum posts asking if is at all possible to install Citrix NetScaler VPX into VMware Workstation and if it passes traffic when it is installed within VMware Workstation. Well, I’m doing this all the time for testing purposes with every new version of Citrix NetScaler VPX that comes out.

In this guide I will only show how to get a working Citrix NetScaler VPX into VMware Workstation VM.

Materials used for this:
- Citrix NetScaler VPX for ESX 10 Build 54.6 (link);
- VMware OVF Tool 2.1.0 (link);
- VMware Workstation 8;
- WinRAR.

Citrix NetScaler 10: Apply Citrix Receiver Theme

You may have noticed in the Release Notes of Citrix NetScaler 10 that is possible to apply the new Citrix Receiver theme to the Access Gateway Enterprise logon page.

As per the Release notes:

Apply the Citrix Receiver theme to the logon page
You can use the command line to overwrite the original Access Gateway logon page with the Citrix Receiver theme

Only the how is nowhere to be found in the Citrix documentation. Update: the official Citrix product documentation on how to apply the Citrix Receiver theme to Citrix Access Gateway Enterprise 10 can be found here:
http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/access-gateway-10/agee-client-connect-cr-new-theme-page-tsk.html
So, although the explanation below will work, I’d have to recommend using Citrix product documentation.

Well, Jarian Gibson found out how (So no credit for me), you can also go tot the forum post, it is the same task sequence.

Citrix NetScaler 10 is Calling Home

With the introduction of Citrix NetScaler 10 all kinds of brand new features are waiting to be explored, one of them is Citrix NetScaler Call Home. Call Home is actually a feature that needs to be enabled on the Citrix NetScaler just as we are used from other Citrix NetScaler features.

>enable feature ch

It was already possible to upload the data into https://taas.citrix.com manually, so this is pretty much the next step for automating this process. https://taas.citrix.com is still in beta.

Security bug: Users can change Citrix WI Site by changing path in URL

At first I thought I was going out of my mind, fortunately Citrix Tech Support has confirmed this bug and are working on a solution.

Installing a brand new pair of Citrix NetScaler MPX 5500 with the latest Citrix NetScaler build (9.3-55.6).

The Citrix NetScaler security design was made so to create 9 Access Gateway Virtual Servers all with their own Citrix Web Interface site so that all the traffic could be isolated and different kinds of security measures could be applied to the different Access Gateway Virtual Servers. There are multiple Citrix XenApp Farms in de backend where the different users would land depending of the target audience.

You are not logged in. Please login. (Citrix NetScaler)

Got this error message when trying to logon Citrix NetScaler using Internet Explorer, normally I’d switch to using Firefox where I do not have this problem. So, I had the issue before but never paid any attention to it since I mostly use FF anyway. In this case the customer is using dedicated management servers where switching to, upgrading or downgrading the browser was not an option since it was a company policy version (IE 8). The NetScaler are located in the DMZ and only reachable through these management servers.

Resolution was quite simple but it took me some time to figure it out (delete IE cache, delete Java cache, delete profile, IE compatibility mode, console session, etc), under Internet Option => Security, the setting for Cookies were set to “Block All Cookies”, setting this to the default “Medium” resolved the issue.

So, no biggy this time but it may help you out sometime.

Citrix NetScaler with SSD (first impression)

The Citrix NetScaler MPX 5500-7500 and 9500 appliance models now ship with Solid State Drives and says (good?)bye to the platter disk for these particulair models. This was anounced by Citrix back in februari this year: http://blogs.citrix.com/2012/02/09/citrix-netscaler-moves-to-solid-state-drives-for-future-mpx-5500-7500-and-9500-shipments/

Citrix has been using Solid State Drives in the MPX 17500/19500/21500 platforms for a longer time but they are only used for mounting the /flash volume. In the MPX 5500/7500/9500 the /flash volume is mounted on a CompactFlash Card. The (platter) Hard Disk Drive which is now being replaced by an SSD is used for the /var volume, this is where all the data and logs files are kept.

I now have a set of Citrix NetScaler MPX 5500 series which has been delivered with such Solid State Drives. The SSD in question is a Samsung 2.5” 128GB SSD (SATA3.0Gbps) which is known as a Samsung 470 series. This particulair SSD can perform sequential reads up to 250 MB/sec and sequential writes at 220 MB/sec. In comparison to the latest releases of Solid State Drives those numbers are not amazing. More information of the SSD : http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/memory-storage/MZ-5PA128/US-specs

Copy webcontent to Citrix NS/AG from FTP site through a Cron job

I have a customer who would like the Citrix NetScaler (Access Gateway and AAA website) website to dynamically retrieve files to show customized content without web developers entering the Citrix NetScaler on a frequent basis.

One thing you do have to remember is that over-customizing the Citrix Access Gateway portal page is in fact not supported by Citrix. I do not think there are a lot of people out there who actually know this. Now, they will not act very difficult if you alter a picture here or there or customize a little text, but be aware of over-customizing. Next to support issues, you can run into trouble when new Citrix NetScaler updates come out that are not going to be aware of your customizations.

Now, this particulair customer over-customizes a lot! What they wanted is to have an iFrame in the Access Gateway (and AAA) page which showed visitors updated news, links, RSS Feeds etc. This iFrame showed the content of a Microsoft Sharepoint environment (please, don’t ask why). We tried publishing this iFrame through Citrix Netcaler but did not work (long story short, it was because of Microsoft Sharepoint). So now we came up with the idea to copy this content periodially to the Citrix NetScaler through the use of a Cron job and FTP. (See image below).