Tag: MDT

Adding Client Printer Redirection for Citrix Workspace App for Mac and Linux to your Citrix Master Image

Today I learned: Citrix Printer Redirection for Mac and Linux is not available Out-Of-The-Box on the Citrix Master Images I install. In this blog post, I will detail the steps I’ve taken to add this missing piece to all of my Master Images.

Introduction

Although quite rare in Germany, a few of our customers use MacBooks at home for the home office. Last week a customer created a ticket, that he couldn’t print on his home printer, although printer redirection was allowed for him in Citrix Studio. At first, I suggested the usual troubleshooting steps, like updating the Citrix Workspace app for Mac and checking the local preferences of the app. Obviously, both didn’t help. I then checked the problem myself and didn’t find an obvious problem. A quick search then led me to two Citrix KB articles, which revealed a knowledge gap on my side:

Client Printing from Linux/MAC is not available on Windows Server 2016 and 2019 (out of the box)

The following Citrix knowledge base articles explain what’s necessary to activate that feature:

  1. CTX283355: Client Printing from Linux/MAC is not working on Windows Server 2016 and 2019
  2. CTX140208: Citrix Workspace App for Mac and Linux fail to Redirect Local printer to Citrix Sessions

Summary of the knowledge base articles:

  1. Download the HP driver update for HP Color LaserJet 2800 Series PS driver from Microsoft Update Catalog.
  2. Inject the driver into the operating system.
  3. Add the printer driver to the printer driver store.
  4. The next time the user logs on, it will just work.

Continue reading “Adding Client Printer Redirection for Citrix Workspace App for Mac and Linux to your Citrix Master Image”

Caution: FSLogix 2009 (2.9.7621.30127) profiles won’t logoff completely

At three customer sites I created test machine catalogs with FSLogix 2009, and all of them had the same issue, that FSLogix profiles won’t logoff completely at the end of the day.

Update January 11, 2021: I was informed about a better solution via Twitter, and updated the Blog post accordingly.

The Problem

During my personal tests with FSLogix 2009 (2.9.7621.30127) I discovered that the profiles won’t logoff completely at the end of the day. See the following screenshots.
Hanging profiles (1)
Hanging profiles (2)

You can clearly see, that despite there are no active or disconnected user sessions, some of the VHDX disks are still mounted, but more important the folders from C:\users\ won’t vanish.

This makes a second login impossible on the same VDA.

Download and install latest Office 365 via Office Deployment Tool (ODT)

Inspired by Trond Eric Haavarstein’s evergreen PowerShell setup scripts, I created a download and install script for Office 365 Deployment Tool (ODT).

Microsoft Office 365 is the new standard in the EUC space right now. To honor this, we need a fast and reliable way to install it with our favorite deployment tools like MDT or PDQ,  for example when you rebuild your master images.

There are a few different ways to deploy Office 365, but they are all similar:

  • You need the Office 365 Click-to-run setup.exe (Office Deployment Tool (ODT))
  • You need a XML configuration file
  • You decide to deploy from a pre-build offline cache or the files are downloaded from Microsoft each and every time

And then you go: setup.exe /configure configuration.xml

Pretty straight forward you think, but non the less I had problems with this approach. And this is due to the fact, that the Office Deployment Tool itself gets updated pretty often. And this breaks your unattended deployments sooner or later, as the setup.exe stops working. Continue reading “Download and install latest Office 365 via Office Deployment Tool (ODT)”

Download and install latest Release of PowerShell

I created a PowerShell script to include the latest Version of PowerShell into your MDT Reference Image.

With the General Availability (GA) of PowerShell 7, it is time to think about updating our MDT Reference Images. Furthermore the increasing number of remote backends that require a minimum TLS 1.2 for remote connections with for example Invoke-WebRequest like PowerShell Gallery and several other JSON APIs.

Continue reading “Download and install latest Release of PowerShell”

Integrate PDQ Deploy with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT)

A PDQ Deploy Enterprise license is an easy way to integrate evergreen applications into your MDT master images. In this blog post I’m going to show you one way to do this.

Download the latest release of PDQ Deploy:
https://link.pdq.com/dl-deploy-release

Start the setup
Start the setup

Continue reading “Integrate PDQ Deploy with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT)”