I’ve spent some time in the past couple of days working out how to do an unattended install of Web Interface and Advanced Access Control and certainly been a challenge. Whilst I haven’t worked everything out, I thought that I would outline what I’ve found out thus far. Why would we want to automate the installation of AAC? Just like your Terminal Servers, the servers running AAC should be stateless, so an unattended installation will provide a method for replicating servers and for disaster recovery.
I’ve been speedlinking some interesting Network Access Protection links in the past (which you can find here, here, here and here) and as speedlinking is so very 2006, I thought that I would rebrand these types of posts to ‘The Short NAP’. So here’s The Short NAP for Tuesday 20 March 2007.
In my previous article on customising the Presentation Server Client, I outlined the steps required to make a custom package for deployment to your client machines. That just article covers creating the custom package using the packager, but there a few other customisations you might be interested in:
Here’s an easy way to crash the Microsoft Firewall service in ISA Server - create a server publishing rule that allows all high ports inbound to an internal NATed IP address.
If for whatever reason you are looking to remove Adobe Reader from your computers, here’s how to remove these applications via a script or some other unattended means. I have tested this with Adobe Reader 6.0.1, 7.0.9 and 8.0 which are all readily available from the Adobe web site and all use Windows Installer. I was also able to test Adobe Reader 5.1 which utilises a standard setup application from InstallShield.
Gee, I expected a little more than this from Citrix - the new Presentation Server Client version 10 is still using the old 16-bit Windows Help format (.HLP). What’s the problem with this you say? Well, Windows Help is no longer included with Windows Vista and Microsoft have been discouraging its’ use for some time now. Yes you can now download a version of Windows Help for Vista from Microsoft, but it’s not guaranteed to work with all .HLP files.
The Citrix Presentation Server Client provides the ability to customise the client before you deploy it to your workstations. Customisation of the client is an important step to ensure the best possible experience for your users and it is yet very simple to achieve:
TweakVI is a tweaking and “optimisation” application from Totalidea that is essentially a front end for a large number of registry settings that you can enable or disable to change the behaviour of features in Windows Vista. The application is mainly aimed at power users but I would assume that some slightly less power users would be interested in this application as well.
There are quite a few design choices in Windows Vista that have me baffled, especially where an interface change to me seems quite logical but Microsoft have not implemented one. The Safely Remove Hardware feature is one such change.
