Dealing with the new Citrix Receiver

Citrix has long since been a major player in cloud computing. They are well known for their XenApp presentation product. XenApp allows you to host a program or set of programs from a server so that users remotely or locally can run them. This is a lot like Microsoft Terminal Services, in fact, it is based off the same thing. However, Citrix allows you to publish single programs rather than a full desktop. This is very useful in enterprise environments, or even publishing out to your customers. Many schools use this to publish education use programs such as Microsoft Office, or other software.

Older programs that were based off the legacy Metaframe product may be using older methods for licensing or determining what station is connecting to the farm. For example, one program I support uses the “Client Name” to handle licensing. The client name is basically what is forwarded into your Citrix session as the computer name.

Up until Citrix XenApp Online Plugin 12.x, you have been able to specify the Client Name. The purpose of this is because your customer’s computer will not always be named exactly so to match what your homegrown application is expecting. This allows you to forward a different computer name instead of having to rename their actual computer.

XenApp Online Plugin, Program Neighborhood, and other products have since been discontinued and are being phased out for the new Citrix Receiver. Citrix Receiver isn’t too bad of a design. It has a fairly simple and intuitive interface. However, it is lacking a lot of settings in the base program. But with registry edits, you can actually modify pretty much any setting you had before.

Warning – Do not edit the registry unless you know specifically what you are doing. It is very dangerous to edit it randomly, and always make backups. Do this at your own risk.

TWIMode – This is the setting which controls if you want to run the application in Seamless Window mode or not. If you have several high resolution monitors, and the System Administrator hasn’t increased the video memory for sessions to accommodate your resolution, the session will automatically degrade the resolution or color depth. In situations like this, it may be better to disable seamless window and run in a fixed resolution.

Registry Keys (Windows User Level)-

x86 – HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareCitrixICA ClientEngineLockdown ProfilesAll RegionsLockdownVirtual ChannelsSeamless Windows

x64 – HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareWow6432NodeCitrixICA ClientEngineLockdown ProfilesAll RegionsLockdownVirtual ChannelsSeamless Windows

You will find a key called “TWIMode”. Default value is *. Set to 0 (zero) to turn off seamless window mode. After doing this you will want to set the horizontal (DesiredHRES) and vertical resolution (DesiredVRES). What you set these to will depend on your application and your preferred size. I like 1024×768 (HxV). Another common is 1280×1024 (HxV). To disable these keys replace the value with a *.

http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/ica-settings/ica-settings-twimode.html

ClientName – This settings is the one I mentioned above that we use in our environment to forward this computer name to a homegrown application.

Registry Keys (Windows User Level)-

x86 – HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareCitrixICA ClientEngineLockdown ProfilesAll RegionsLockdownClient Engine

x64 – HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareWow6432NodeCitrixICA ClientEngineLockdown ProfilesAll RegionsLockdownClient Engine

Look for the key called “ClientName”. Default value is nothing (“”). Set that to whatever you would like the computer name to be. You will have to close your session and reopen to have this go into effect. When you set it to “” it is considered Dynamic Client Name mode where it just forwards your computer name. If you have any value in there it will use that value instead.

http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/ica-settings/ica-settings-clientname.html

These are really the few settings we use in my environment, however, from the client side you have a wide range of things that you can modify to fit your needs. Remember to be careful what you edit, and make sure you test it thoroughly before deploying out to any users.