Looks like there have been some updates to the Activity Manager on the Citrix Cloud Director. Buttons have been moved. Layout appears different. The contact card in the upper-left appears now on the Activity Manager and Details page. The overall feel of this is really nice and feels sleeker.
The Details pane appears to have remained the same.
Sometimes you do adds to a group for reasons. Maybe you are doing a staged migration of things and you are using a group to do that. Maybe someone wants a report of new users added in the last week. This can help do that for you. To complete this, you just need to run a command or two and generate your starting file to compare to. Then you setup a scheduled task to run on a weekly basis and there you have it! If you have had no changes, then it will not email you. If you do have changes, it will email with attachment and count of number of objects added. This also does this based on the named dates of the files so if you need to run it earlier, you will need to do a copy of the file and change the name to reflect a week earlier, or change the logic to not use the date names.
To get your starting file, you will need to create your folder to store the reports and run the command below in PowerShell with a machine that has the AD module loaded as part of the RSAT tools. You will also need the ScheduledTasks module loaded to create the scheduled tasks via PowerShell.
$outputLocation = "C:\scripts\logs\GroupChanges"
$domain = "DomainOfGroup"
$groupName = "GroupToMonitor"
$date = Get-Date
$dateReport = ($date).ToString("MMddyyyy")
$outputFileName = "$dateReport-group-members.csv"
$getCurrentGroupMembership = (Get-ADGroup -Server $domain $groupName | Get-ADGroupMember -Recursive | Select-Object -Unique | Sort | Select-Object SamAccountName)
$getCurrentGroupMembership | Export-CSV -Path $outputLocation\$outputFileName -Append -NoTypeInformation
Second verse, somewhat similar to the first.
# Script to do a weekly compare of Active Directory group memberships. Requires AD module to be loaded and an account / service account with read permissions to the objects.
$outputLocation = "C:\scripts\logs\GroupChanges"
$domain = "DomainOfGroup"
$groupName = "GroupToMonitor"
$date = Get-Date
$dateLastWeek = ($date).AddDays(-7).ToString("MMddyyyy")
$dateReport = ($date).ToString("MMddyyyy")
$outputFileName = "$dateReport-group-members.csv"
$importFileNameLastWeek = "$dateLastWeek-group-members.csv"
$deltaFileName = "$dateReport-delta.csv"
$report = @()
$getCurrentGroupMembership = (Get-ADGroup -Server $domain $groupName | Get-ADGroupMember -Recursive | Select-Object -Unique | Sort | Select-Object SamAccountName)
$getCurrentGroupMembership | Export-CSV -Path $outputLocation\$outputFileName -Append -NoTypeInformation
$inputFileNameLastWeek = Import-Csv -Path "$outputLocation\$importFileNameLastWeek"
$objectCompare = @{
ReferenceObject = ($getCurrentGroupMembership)
DifferenceObject = ($inputFileNameLastWeek)
}
$deltaNames = (Compare-Object @objectCompare).InputObject
if($deltaNames -ne $null){
$deltaNames | Export-Csv -Path $outputLocation\$deltaFileName -Append -NoTypeInformation
$numberNewUsers = "New Users: " + ($deltaNames).Count
$report += $deltaNames
$report += $numberNewUsers
}
if($deltaNames -eq $null){
Exit
}
$style = "<style>BODY{font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;}"
$style = $style + "TABLE{border: 1px solid black; border-collapse: collapse;}"
$style = $style + "TH{border: 1px solid black; background: #dddddd; padding: 5px; }"
$style = $style + "TD{border: 1px solid black; padding: 5px; }"
$style = $style + "</style>"
$body = $report | ConvertTo-Html -Head $style
$dateEmail = Get-Date -Format "MM-dd-yyyy"
$emailFrom = "EmailFrom@company.com"
$emailTo = "Someone@company.com"
$subject = "Weekly Group Check | $dateEmail"
$email = New-object System.Net.Mail.MailMessage
$email.to.Add($emailTo)
$email.From = New-Object system.net.Mail.MailAddress $emailFrom
$email.Subject = $subject
$email.IsBodyHtml = $true
$email.body = $body
$attachment = "$outputLocation\$deltaFileName"
$email.Attachments.Add($attachment)
$smtpserver = "mail.company.com"
$smtp = new-object Net.Mail.SmtpClient($smtpServer)
$smtp.Send($email)
And after you save that file, you will need to create the scheduled task. Make sure this is a machine that will be on and available during the time you want to run the script. I’m using “weeklychanges.ps1” as the example saved file name, running at 10am on Saturdays. Below will need to be ran from an elevated prompt / ISE in order to create the task without getting an “Access denied” error.
$taskName = 'WeeklyGroupCheck'
$time = "10am"
$user = "domain\user"
$credentials = Get-Credential -Credential $user
$password = $credentials.GetNetworkCredential().Password
$scriptPath = "c:\scripts\weeklycheck.ps1"
$trigger = New-ScheduledTaskTrigger -Weekly -At $time -DaysOfWeek Saturday
$action = New-ScheduledTaskAction -Execute "PowerShell.exe" -Argument "-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -noprofile -file $scriptPath"
Register-ScheduledTask -TaskName $taskName -Trigger $trigger -User $user -Password $password -Action $action -RunLevel Highest -Force
So I had a user that had requested the Storyboard feature of PowerPoint. I found a couple ways that you could do it. You can install the Visual Studio Community Edition with installing either the Universal Platform Windows development (~8GB) or Office / Sharepoint development (~17GB). That looked rather large install for the feature. Also found another option for enabling the feature, installing the Microsoft Team Foundation Office Integration. That was less than ~1GB. That seemed the better option. So went with that! So if you need some storyboarding powers, the TFS Office Integration seems the easier and faster method to get it going.
Article with links: Storyboard with Visual Studio
Microsoft Team Foundation Server Office Integration: Microsoft TFS Office Integration
Sometimes it is just good to have all the network names of your VDI and IP. This will get the VM name, network adapter, network name defined in vSphere, and IP.
# Script to get network names for VDI machines. This was tested with VMware 7.x, Citrix Cloud connection configured with the "default" profile, and VDI with single NIC.
asnp Citrix*
Get-XDAuthentication -ProfileName "default"
$date = Get-Date -Format MMddyyyy
$report = @()
$CurrentItem = 0
$PercentComplete = 0
$ctxVDI = (Get-BrokerMachine -MaxRecordCount 100000 | Where-Object SessionSupport -eq "SingleSession" | Where-Object HostedMachineName -ne $null | Select-Object HostedMachineName).HostedMachineName
$totalItems = ($ctxVDI).count
foreach($ctx in $ctxVDI){
Write-Progress -Activity "Getting network name for $ctx" -Status "$PercentComplete% Complete:" -PercentComplete $PercentComplete
$line = "" | Select-Object VM, Name, NetworkName, IPAddress
$networkInfo = (Get-VM $ctx | Get-NetworkAdapter)
$ipAddress = (Get-VM $ctx | Select-Object @{N="IPAddress";E={@($_.guest.IPAddress[0])}})
if($networkInfo -ne $null){
$line.VM = $ctx
$line.Name = $networkInfo.Name
$line.NetworkName = $networkInfo.NetworkName
$line.IPAddress = ($ipAddress).IPAddress
}
$report += $line
$CurrentItem++
$PercentComplete = [int](($CurrentItem / $TotalItems) * 100)
}
$report | export-csv c:\scripts\logs\$date-vdinetworks.csv -NoTypeInformation -Append
So you got your SAML Authentication server all configured. You got your MFA rolling. You start your day. You open up another app that has an assigned enterprise application to it with conditional access set. Then you open up your Citrix tab. You go to the site. It redirects you. And BOOM. Just like that. ERROR!!!
You think think think and think about why you are getting the error. You know when you opened Citrix FIRST yesterday the world was all sunny and bright. But today, that is not the case. But you really read the error closely. And you notice something… Authentication method ‘Password.’ You know that when you opened Citrix yesterday with your password and MFA, then continued on, it all worked. But change the order, and it does not. So. You go and check your SAML authentication settings.
You’ll see that by default, the “Password” class type is selected when you create the SAML authentication server. If you click on it so it is no longer blue, then save it, you notice that everything seems to work. So anything that is set there is EXPECTED in the assertion, not what is ACCEPTED. This would happen more if you have conditional access to not prompt on prem for one app, and prompt always on the other enterprise app. If you clear that, it will allow you to use the SAML assertion you got from the other app, assuming it is with the same IDP. There is also another option that you see outlined. “Force Authentication.” This option, if set, will force the session you start to redo the authentication and not use anything that you have cached. This is also good for testing purposes to force it to go through the authentication process.
With the wonders of doing your certificates on a much more frequent basis now, this becomes a yearly task. If you are using the WebPlayer feature of Session Recording on-prem (it is really nice), there is a little more tedious process you have to complete.
This link has the overview you need to get you through the process. The only step I did not see in the article was the startwebsocketserver command at the very end. The location of the SsRecWebSocketServer.exe.config file you can find in the C:\Program Files\Citrix\SessionRecording\Server\Bin folder. I recommended making a copy of the file before you start.
But for your steps….
Get the certificate from your certificate provider of choice.
Import the certificate onto the Session Recording server.
Bind the certificate in IIS.
Bind the certificate in the Session Recording Server properties.
Export the cert as PFX to a local folder.
Perform the operations in the link above using OpenSSL to convert the exported PFX into a PEM file and extract the key file.
Modify the SsRecWebSocketServer.exe.config file in the C:\Program Files\Citrix\SessionRecording\Server\Bin.
Enter the location for the cert file and the key file.
Save file.
Open an elevated command prompt.
Navigate to the C:\Program Files\Citrix\SessionRecording\Server\Bin folder.
Enter “TestPolicyAdmin.exe -stopwebsocketserver” and press enter.
Enter “TestPolicyAdmin.exe -startwebsocketserver” and press enter.
The WebPlayer should be working as expected. If you do not update the SsRecWebSocketServer.exe.config file, the WebPlayer will give a WebSocket error.
**Update: So.. It appears it does show up but… it shows under “Show built-in Responder Policies. **
Did an upgrade of 13.0-84.11 to 13.0-87.9. Same thing occurred as in the upgrade to 13.0-85.15. The responder policies seem to vanish from the GUI. It will show the correct number of policies at the overview screen, if you look on the bound vServer, but not in the pane that shows all available policies. If you check the ns.conf, you will see the policies are there and are bound where they should be. Seems to be a bug again where it goes the way of the dodo.
Ran into some fun with setting up FAS for MFA. I was testing a shorter list of ciphers on a test SSL profile on ADC on the test vServer. Come to find out, when accessing a machine that was using MFA from outside the network, I was getting an SSL error 4 on Windows machines and SSL error 47 on Stratodesk machines. I hadn’t seen that error since Receiver 4.x. It appears there are some additional ciphers needed in regards to the Citrix Workspace App. It appeared to work fine with the other cipher set using the HTML5 Workspace App. This article has the updated cipher set you need to have or it may cause you some issues (Changes To FAS Ciphers). These would be applied to your SSL profile assigned to the vServer on the ADC.
I also ran into an issue with EndGame.
When trying to connect from to VDI Windows 10 machines, you would encounter an incorrect user name or password error if EndGame was enabled, instead of it SSO logging you in.
Checking the event log on the machine, you encounter a Smart Card Logon Event 5.
There are 2 DLLs you have to add to a global exclusion, scardhook.dll and scardhook64.dll. These are located under C:\Program Files\Citrix\ICAService. Just excluding those DLLs got rid of the Event 5 Smart Card Logon error and allowed the Provider DLL to initialize.
After getting these exclusions applied, SSO works normally for accessing the VDI machines.
So you want to know how many people are in the groups. As luck would have it, you can get that. There was an interesting thing that I encountered with Get-ADGroupMember when trying to return a count. If there were 0 members, it returned correctly. If there were 2 or more, it returned correctly. If there was 1 member, it returned nothing. It wasn’t null as I checked that. It just returned nothing. Found the answer on this site as to why it was doing it:Why it returned nothing. TLDR: From Martin9700, PowerShell, when only 1 object is returned it is returned AS that object. Count is property of an array (and you can have an array of pretty much any variable/object type)
So with that in mind, I went the route below to do a Measure-Object, then do the count. That returned the results I expected. I also wanted to only select the unique users in the group just in case there were nested groups that a user might have been in more than one of.
# Script to get user group counts. This requires the AD Powershell module, access rights to AD, a central location of Citrix groups, a naming convention, and used in Powershell ISE 5.1.
$domain = "domain"
$searchBase = "OU=CitrixGroups,OU=Groups,DC=somecompany,DC=com"
$getCtxGroups = (Get-ADGroup -server $domain -SearchBase $searchBase -Filter {SamAccountName -like "CitrixGroupNamePattern*"} | Select-Object SamAccountName)
$totalItems = ($getCtxGroups).Count
$date = Get-Date -Format MMddyyyy
$report = @()
$currentItem = 0
$percentComplete = 0
ForEach($ctxGroup in $getCtxGroups){
Write-Progress -Activity "Processing user count on ($ctxGroup).SamAccountName" -Status "$PercentComplete% Complete:" -PercentComplete $PercentComplete
$userCount = (Get-ADGroup -Server $domain $ctxGroup.SamAccountName | Get-ADGroupMember -Recursive | Select-Object -Unique | Measure-Object).Count
$line = "" | Select GroupName, UserCount
$line.GroupName = $ctxGroup.SamAccountName
if($userCount -ne 0){
$line.UserCount = $userCount
}
if($userCount -eq 0){
$line.UserCount = "Empty"
}
$currentItem++
$percentComplete = [int](($currentItem / $totalItems) * 100)
$report += $line
}
$report | Export-Csv c:\scripts\logs\$date-ADUserGroup-Counts.csv -Append -NoTypeInformation
So you’ve downloaded a cool new module. Your buddy gave you a module to test out. You copy it over and start looking to load it. You get the oh no! message. Your computer thinks you are being shady and blocks the file.
You have heard tale of an option to right-click EVERY single file and unblock the files.
All you want to do is unblock the files and load the module (at your own risk of course!). Well, then. Do it! Copy the module to your module directory in your path. Set the path to where it is. Iterate through those files, then load that module!
# Script to unblock files
$path = 'C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\somemodule'
$files = Get-ChildItem -Path $path -Recurse | ForEach{$_.FullName}
$module = $files | Select-String -Pattern "psm1"
ForEach($file in $files){
Unblock-File $file -Confirm:$false
}
Import-Module $module -Force
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