Citrix Farm and JDE.INI storage

[sraemdon]

This is not so much a OneWorld question, but it relates to implementing OneWorld with Citrix in an environment where other Citrix implemenations already exist.

We are currently implementing OW XE with a Citrix farm.
When we started with this implementation, we where posed with the problem that we would have to maintain user specific INI files on multiple Citrix Servers in the farm.
To solve the problem, we came up with a concept we call: Profile Servers. Every time a user logs on to a Citrix server, a TS home directory is mapped to this Profile Server. Oneworld will then grab the JDE.INI file from this location.
This all works well when yo work with locally stored user profiles on the Citrix Server. It becomes an issue when you work with Active Directory.

We are a company with locations and Citrix installations in virtually every country around the world. A lot of users work on a Citrix installation in the States and from the moment OneWorld is live, with our European Citrix Farm.

Now comes the intersting part: How can you assign multiple TS Home directories to one Active Directory user?
We have worked with MS and Citrix and they basically tell us that this is the way it is designed.

Has anyone found some backdoors to solve this?

Stijn Raemdonck
HP-UX 11.i / Oracle 8i / Citrix Xpe / OneWorld XE

 

[rhunt01]

Stijn,

Please clarify why you need multiple TSE home directories for each AD user? Theoretically, couldn't you set the TSE home directory for each user to the local profile server you mentioned? You could use this server as the file server for printqueue and have each user pull the jde.ini file from a netlogon directory of a local domain controller. This way, profiles are not local to the citrix server, but rather on a server local with regard to your LAN. This way, all users in, we'll say Japan, would be using a server in Japan for their profile (\\server\share\username\windows) and for their output directory as specified in the jde.ini. In this case, the output directory could be specified as Z:\printqueue, and the profile setting in Usermanager for domains would have the user's Z: drive set to (\\server\share\username\windows\Printqueue). Changes in the JDE.ini would always be represented in each new session because users would be pulling it from the DC's netlogon directory, as exported by you from whatever DC you are replicating it from.

You mentioned that you have multiple citrix farms around the world. The above will work even over a modem, as long as the servers mentioned are all local to each other. Does this help?

Good Luck!

Ryan Hunt
OneWorld XE; Update2; SP15.1
AS400; V4R5
DS: Win2k SP2, SQL 7.0 SP3
TSE's: Win2k(SP2) & NT4.0(SP6a) with Metaframe 1.8

 

[sraemdon]

Ryan,
Thanks for your response. I understand what you're getting, at but am afraid it does not help us a lot.
The issue is that I have quite some users that have to access a Citrix farm in the US and a farm in Europe.
We only have limited bandwith available between the two continents and therefore want to have a server in the US that serves as a home dir server and a server in Europe that serves as a home dir server.
AD does not allow this.

Regards,
Stijn.

Stijn Raemdonck
HP-UX 11.i / Oracle 8i / Citrix Xpe / OneWorld XE