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Welcome

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Welcome to my personal blog site.
The main purpose of this site is to share various automation resources and scripts for various End User Computing solutions. Previously it was focussed on Ivanti Identity Director (formerly known as RES ONE Service Store & RES IT Store) related resources. Nowadays I (sadly) don’t work with ID very often so I changed the website’s focus to a personal blog site.

If you would like to add content to this site (in the form of blogposts, building blocks or anything like that) please let me know and I will make you sure you receive the credit for it. Also, feel free to use any of my scripts, change them and publish them as your own.

Setup anti-screensharing and anti-keylogging with Citrix App Protection

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Introduction
In 2021 Citrix introduced the App Protection to Virtual Apps and Desktops. This feature can protect your Citrix resources from unwanted keylogging and screensharing to make sure all your (confidential) data remains secure, even from endpoints that are not managed by your IT department. I was recently tasked to set this up at a customer. While there is a decent amount of documentation available, it’s all over the place. So I wanted to do a blogpost that combines all the relevant steps that need to be performed to get it to work.

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Unattended Citrix PVS vDisk Creation

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NOTE: This blog was also posted on community.citrix.com (link) on April 3rd, 2024.

Working on your image (but different)
When building vDisk/golden-images for Provisioning Services I usually recommend automating this process. This will ensure that every image is created in the same order and make errors a lot less likely.
At the end of this image-build you would need to create an vDisk from this installation. This will copy the entire installation to a VHD(X) file and imported to your Provisioning Services environment.
You can then ‘provision’ (stream) that vDisk to all your session hosts.

The automation of the image itself is a lot more common nowadays then it was a couple of years ago, but the final conversion to vDisk is still done manually most of the time.
For a customer I created a PowerShell script that also automates this last part and I thought it would be a good one to share with the community. To show it can be done and also to persuade administrators to keep the ‘automate everything’-mindset.

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Show Citrix hosting connection usage

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Background information
Recently I was at a customer operates an Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops farm that connects to multiple hypervisors (VMware vSphere and Nutanix AHV) to be used with Machine Creation Services. With migrations and new hardware, the site now has multiple hypervisor connections to the same hypervisor and even more hypervisor resources (hosting units) in each connection. To perform a clean up we wanted to create an overview for each resource/hosting unit to see which machine catalogs (provisioning schemes) use these resources, with the goal of removing the ones that are not used (anymore).

To get this overview we have created a PowerShell script that does exactly that. This short blogpost will describe the script and how you use it.
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Dutch CUGC: April 2024 Meeting Recap

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NOTE: Usually I post these recaps on MyCUGC.org. But with the move from MyCUGC to the new Citrix Community (link) only technical blogs are posted.

Spring is here and along with it another edition of the bi-annual meetup of the Dutch Citrix User Group (DuCUG). And what an edition it was. Great sessions with lots of Citrix-related updates, know-how and experiences. As with earlier recaps, I wrote this blog to share what this event is like and what each session was about. Maybe I can convince some of you to attend. 😉
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Use Sports-Tracker.com API with PowerShell

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Introduction
Since the whole ‘COVID-era’, I, like most of us IT-folk, work a lot more from home and only go to the office 1 or 2 days a week. When working from home I usually go to the gym around the end of the morning. It is around 4.8 kilometer from my house and I try to go by bicycle whenever I can (I am Dutch after all), so I do my warmup on the go. And when I say bicycle, I mean my old 90’s Trek Mountainbike which may or may not fall apart while riding it.

Old mountainbike

Why do I go to the gym at all? A bit of discipline, a bit of staying in shape, a bit of self-confidence. For every bike-ride over there I turn on the Sports-Tracker app to log the distance and time it takes. Looking at the results I was wondering how many kilometers I have done these last three years. Now of course I can use the app or the website for that, but where is the fun in that if I might be able to do it through an API.

This blog will describe how I found out how the API works an how you can grab the data from PowerShell.

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DuCUG September 2022 Entrance

Dutch CUGC: September 2022 Meeting Recap

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NOTE: This blog was also posted on MyCUGC.org (link) on October 6th, 2022.

Last week (September 28th, 2022) there was another meetup of the Dutch Citrix User Group (DuCUG). This bi-annual event in the Netherlands has a focus on all-things Citrix (and anything related). This edition was once again fantastic and that’s why I want to share this recap with the rest of CUGC.

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Unattended StoreFront March 2021 - Featured image

Unattended Citrix StoreFront Installation and Configuration

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NOTE: This blog was also posted on MyCUGC.org (link) on March 3rd, 2021.

About three years ago, I posted a blog about how to perform an unattended installation and configuration of Citrix StoreFront with Ivanti Automation. It did the installation, the creation of a new store and it added a second StoreFront server to the server group.

Since most organizations are stepping away from (still awesome) tools like Ivanti Automation and are moving towards solutions like Puppet, Ansible, Chocolatey, Packer, plain PowerShell, etc., I wanted to create a PowerShell script that does the same, but does not require an automation tool.

In this short blog, I will post how it works, how you can use it and of course the scripts themselves. Keep in mind that this is just an example, it is not a definitive solution for deploying StoreFront. Also, these scripts are not signed with a certificate because you need to enter your environment specific variables.

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