Citrix Gateway and Receiver/Workspace

[firetaz834]

Thought, I would throw this out for any suggestions to see if this can be done. Due to most everyone having to hunker at home. All of the users where I work are now working from home. To work remotely user's must login using Citrix Gateway, but to properly utilize Citrix Gateway, users must load Citrix Receiver/Workspace on there personal equipment. That is where the problem lies, most user have issues with this.

I was thinking is there a ways The gateway which is just browser location could be loaded on a CD/DVD along with the citrix workspace and have it run totally from the CD. I know I have received CD's with Redhat loaded on it fully operation from the CD and was thinking something like this could be done. If so, it would save alot of IT support call headaches, which the team I'm on are getting multiple times on a daily basis. Is it possible to do or am I just spinning my wheels.

 

[a417]

So you want to make a liveCD that turns what ever it boots on, into a thin client?

It's possible, but I think the issue is more "the users don't want to learn something new", or the current setup needs to be streamlined a little bit better to allow new/infrequent users to get on and proficient. Making a live CD with a thin client is old hat in the Linux community, making one for Windows runs afoul of MS's constant need to make money on licensing and stuff. You will run in to problems with people that literally don't have a CD drive (all the MB-Air and Acer Netbook folks) and people who have differing operating systems on their local computers ...remember, there are still people who use XP on a daily basis because they like it...
I fought with something similar back when my old state went to paperless patient-care-reporting in 2008, and at the same time allowed each agency to choose their own software (?!), yet was nice enough to put a printer in each hospital's ER, and give us standardized hardware (Panasonic TBs). I went thru my own version of IT hell trying to

1. harden the interface against acts of volunteers (everyone knows there's that guy who sits down at every computer he sees and immediately runs DEFRAG.EXE because 'it helps make things betterer', even if he did it yesterday...twice)
2. make it "volly firefighter proof" (not disparaging - but making sure that a guy who gets blasted out of bed at 0437 in december can operate it easily with gloves on and someone shouting at him)
3. meet reasonable HIPAA security standards
4. be reproducible over the fleet of TBs we had
5. make it self correctable, so that most issues can be resolved with minimal effort or support calls

What I ended up doing was really diving into the innards of Windows group security policies, PXE netboot, drive imaging and at the time it was Truecrypt to make a system that would do the same thing every time, just work when they needed it to, and made fixing it "turn it off, push this button during power on, and wait while it reimages the drive from a spare" off a PXE netboot server i hosted.

I think that if you really dive deep into the seedy areas of Citrix (or whatever environ) you can make it a little less user hostile.

Fo' instance...Tunnelblick (OSX VPN client) allows you to script software after valid (and invalid) setups & failures, so one could write some intelligent scripts that handle various issues, start various programs, launch hardened configuration clients (like a web endpoint...) etc...

Good luck!

(and i see my wife use Citrix on her Mac all the time, and i see things and I'm like...ugh, you shouldnt' have to worry about that or this all the time - then I see it done correctly and I think "someone earned their paycheck and hasn't been called on service all in a while")

 

[firetaz834]

Thank you for the feedback, I will take into consideration of what you had given to me as ideas. This may be something that I will never get off of the ground but was trying to think of a solution that fell somewhere in between no man's land of user's own equipment to that of the company providing each and every user a corporate equipment. Again, thank you for the reply and some things to ponder as I sit home doing support and trying to think of ways to make it simpler for all involved.

 

[a417]

Yah, man...i've been there. I think the bosses workplace IT dept needs to learn that you don't need to provision every account with every thing all the time...that screen is a mess. Then on the other hand I've seen slipstreamed Citrix logins that look slick as **** and do exactly what the person needs.

Maybe the IT dept needs an enema?