Virtualization, EUC, and Computing in General
These days, SAML authentication is mainstream and web services are expected to support it in some fashion or another; the SAML 2.0 standard is over 10 years old at this point! One of the key areas of focus for NetScaler is Authentication and Authorization and as such you would expect full support of SAML – and you’d be right. But if you’ve never worked with the SAML protocol, it can seem very daunting at first! … Read more…
Ever wish that you could just block all network traffic from known bad IP addresses? When you start to think about the logistics of this, it would be nice if you didn’t have to manage it either. If you have NetScaler Platinum, you’ve got both of your wishes – and as an added bonus, it’s free! That’s right, if you have a NetScaler Platinum appliance and you are running build 11.0 or later, you have an … Read more…
I ran into an issue recently on my Dell XPS 15 running Windows 10 where the BitLocker PIN entry text was missing. I have BitLocker TPM+PIN enabled so at boot or wakeup from hibernation, I am prompted to enter a PIN to unlock the drive. The screen was still the same blue color but the problem was that all of the text was missing – it was a blank blue screen. A workaround I found was to … Read more…
*Note: This is not officially supported – do this at your own risk.* Sometimes, virtual appliances or other random VMs in your lab need a simple, widely supported NIC and just wont boot (or install) without one. XenServer uses a Realtek RTL8139 10/100 card when you don’t have integration services installed. This is usually not an issue…but it certainly can be. In older versions of XenServer, there was a patch available as mentioned in this … Read more…
While I was rebuilding my lab, I ran into an issue when building out my demo Exchange OWA front-ended by NetScaler – the error was pretty generic, I would attempt to access the OWA page, was then prompted for authentication by the NetScaler AAA engine running as a part of Unified Gateway, then I was dumped to the following error page: Http/1.1 Service Unavailable – /cgi/selfauth/xxxxx This error page is being presented by the NetScaler, … Read more…
I’ve been very happy with WordPress – it’s easy to use, has a TON of support behind it and can do just about anything you need it to do. After being self-hosted for a while, I realized that it was not a very good model for keeping the site up since my ISP is not super-reliable, and as much as I’d like it to be, the home lab is not an actual datacenter. So I … Read more…
Is Citrix Secure Gateway really End of Life? Not really…it’s tied to the lifecycle of the latest product that it was released with which would be XenApp 6.5 – which is incidentally the last product that it works with. Secure Gateway also does not work with any version of StoreFront, so you’re stuck with Web Interface. What does secure gateway do? It allows for an SSL connection to XenApp and XenDesktop resources to be proxied from … Read more…
Is your database application not performing as well as it should? Is your SQL Server running low on resources? Is your application not written to take advantage of SQL AlwaysOn Availability Groups or database sharding? If you answered yes to any of those questions, then NetScaler Datastream to the rescue! Or, maybe you are looking to demo NetScaler Datastream to get a better idea of what capabilities it has in your SQL environment. If that is … Read more…
Earlier this month I completely re-worked my homelab – with both storage and hardware upgrades as well as the underlying hypervisors. If you’re interested in the changes made, see this post here. So how has the experience with the new gear been? In no particular order, here’s my notes: Miscellaneous Not having to burn 8+GB for a vCenter VM is nice – especially for a lab XenCenter console is far simpler and less of a resource … Read more…
Take a look at the #HomeLab hashtag on twitter, and you will see lots of technology experts that have some pretty extensive lab environments at home – add me to that list. OK I’ve been on that list for a while…my lab has gone through numerous iterations: Started with Hyper-V initial release (2008 – KB950050) Ran StarWind Virtual SAN for a while – great performance offloading cache to RAM Moved away from local storage to SAN\NAS … Read more…