Articles In Infrastructure

By Stephen Kilcoyne, Posted in Infrastructure, Security, Support

As the COVID-19 outbreak continues, it’s important to remember that we’re all in this together. Communities and companies are working together to help stem the tide of the outbreak. The most important thing we can all do right now is maintain social distance, and for many that means working from home.  In recent weeks, our customers have been relying on us to help them enable, monitor, and support wide-scale work from home initiatives. These efforts include extending existing Citrix enviro... read more.

• March 18, 2020

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure, Security

Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 reached end of life on January 14, 2020. This means that Microsoft will no longer be releasing free security patches, updates, or support when something goes wrong. Although these operating systems won’t instantly stop working or become security risks overnight, there are risks with staying on these operating systems for an extended period of time. What happens if I stay on these operating systems? There is a huge risk of being exploited by cyber crimina... read more.

• January 16, 2020

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure, Security

On December 17, 2019, Citrix released a critical advisory regarding a vulnerability that allows for remote code execution: CVE-2019-19781 - Vulnerability in Citrix Application Delivery Controller and Citrix Gateway (https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX267027). The vulnerability exploits a directory traversal attack on the /vpn directory on the NetScaler. It allows for remote execution of code under the user nobody. Gotham previously alerted customers to this vulnerability. Citrix plans to release a perma... read more.

• January 15, 2020

By Ed Bratter, Posted in Infrastructure, Security

Perhaps one of the most popular features of Exchange is the ability to connect Outlook running on a PC to Exchange over the Internet when outside the corporate network without the need to establish a VPN connection. This feature was introduced with Exchange 2003 and is called Outlook Anywhere. Of course, convenience always comes at a price: once enabled, Outlook Anywhere allows anyone with Outlook to connect to Exchange from any PC regardless of who owns it. Many organizations want or need to restrict Outlo... read more.

• January 10, 2020

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure, Virtualization

Microsoft Teams is a unified communication and collaboration platform that combines chat, audio calling, video conferencing, file storage, and application integration. It is a replacement for Skype for Business, which will reach end of life in July 2021. It comes with a company's Office 365 subscription, depending on your licensing plan, and can integrate with non-Microsoft products. The following Office 365 subscription licensing plans enable users for Teams: Image via Microsoft. By hosting Micros... read more.

• December 23, 2019

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Infrastructure, Virtualization

Microsoft has officially released their Desktop as a Service (DaaS) offering, dubbed Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD). There are some standout features of WVD, and as someone who’s been helping customers deliver Windows desktops and applications for 20 years, I feel a strong market momentum behind this offering. Microsoft is making WVD very attractive, starting with a unique multi-session version of Windows 10 which is only available in Azure through this offering and continuing with extended support for... read more.

• October 01, 2019

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure, Support

A common issue I see in Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops deployments is users who are unable to print to their local printers from Mac and Linux clients when using Citrix Universal Printer Driver (UPD ). The good news is, it is a very simple fix! Citrix UPD relies on a series of printer drivers to be installed on the VDA machine. When a client printer is mapped into a session, it is automatically mapped to one of these three drivers: The Citrix Universal Printer and Citrix XPS Universal Printer drivers... read more.

• September 06, 2019

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Infrastructure, Security, Storage

One of the most common attack vectors for cloud servers is through Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) or Secure Shell (SSH). When administrators build servers in the cloud, Microsoft and AWS had typically assigned a public IP to ease management of the servers. There is no VMware Console equivalent in the cloud, so RDP or SSH are the only way to manage a server. The problem starts when that public IP is assigned. Hackers are constantly running scans on the IP ranges owned by the cloud providers, and as soon as a... read more.

• July 10, 2019

By Tom Stanley, Posted in Infrastructure

Splunk is shining its light on Dark Data and enabling companies to extract real business value from their machine data. As the value of that newly exposed information increases, it is important to be able to access it from anywhere, even from mobile devices. Although a Splunk mobile app has been available for a few years, connecting to an on-premises Splunk Enterprise deployment was difficult. The mobile device needed some type of VPN software to access Splunk dashboards, or there were more complicated meth... read more.

• July 01, 2019

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure, Virtualization

As of August 2018, the Citrix Workspace app has replaced Citrix Receiver. The Citrix Workspace app securely aggregates all of your applications and data, whether on-premises or in the cloud, from any device into a single unified app. Below is a sample screenshot of the Workspace app: In order to take full advantage of the Workspace app, it needs to be integrated with the Workspace service which is a fundamental component of Citrix Cloud. The service is responsible for aggregating and delivering all of yo... read more.

• June 21, 2019