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Monday, March 24, 2008

Going On X64? You’ll better check out this:

A few things you will sure notice after installing Citrix Presentation server 4.0 X64. The first thing you will notice is the Citrix quick launch bar. It looks a lot smaller than in the 32bit version, this is because some icons are missing. When you look over the available application on the task bar you’ll find that the Citrix Connection Configuration tool is one of the missing icons.






The first time I saw this, I actually thought something went wrong during the installation. After scrolling and poking the system I finally found that the ICA protocol needs to be configured through the terminal services configuration instead. If I read some Citrix articles prior to the installation I’ve would have probably read about it, but life has to be daunting :) .

When opening the Terminal Services Configuration Utility, you will see that the ICA protocol is added to the connections, where in the 32bit this was only RDP. Looking closer at the properties of the RDP connection, brings up many similar tabs as in the old RDP connection setting, but you’ll sure to notice a new tab called “Citrix Settings”.








This tab does require a closer look. As you see the desktop is restricted to administrators only, and yes this means that a user even part of the remote desktop user group cannot access the desktop through terminal services. So if you want to publish a desktop using RDP to your users, be sure to uncheck this checkbox. Otherwise only administrators are able to logon to the remote desktop of that server.

When looking at the properties of the ICA connection, be sure to check out the ICA Settings tab. Also this tab restricts access to the desktop to only administrators. So again if you want to provide a desktop using the ICA protocol, you’ll need to uncheck this and the one in the RDP settings tab.

What about shadowing? As you can see in the lower part of the ICA connection tab, these options are still available, just in other location.















What about permissions? In the Citrix configuration utility, you could set permissions on the ICA connection to allow shadowing. This is now done through the permissions tab in terminal services configuration tool. You will see that the shadowing permission isn’t available, but is replace by Remote Control which is closer Microsoft terminology, rather than Citrix.






I believe Microsoft is really showing his Trustworthy Computing Initiative in the X64 version of Windows Server 2003, which was announced in 2002. I know this article is not the latest on technology, because Windows Server 2008 RTM has already been released. But X64 is new to some environments, and this article may still come in handy.

2 comments:

  1. 4.0?!?!?!

    This would be a lot more relevent today if you were talking about 4.5 which has been out for a year now.

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  2. No its exactly the same as in PS4.5 (x86 & x64), but there i've would expected the change, not here.

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