Monthly Archives: October 2015

New Module: Creating an RDP file password with PowerShell

Here’s something that is surprisingly tricky to automate in this day and age. Creating a password and storing it in an RDP file. I’m not here to debate the security “knock ons” of doing this, it’s not in my interest and if I’m asked to do something despite advice against it, I do it!

But as always I figured I’d share this feature in case anyone else needs it.

So RDP files encrypt a password in a very specific way and details online are cagey.This is something I set about doing myself and I’m happy to annouce I’ve included it in the following Free Powershell module for your use!

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Altaro VM Backup Review

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Well you may be asking yourself what an EUC focused guy is doing reviewing a backup product, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure either but then something happened and I suddenly grew a strong appreciation for this product… but more on that later.

As one who still remembers (and has the scars) from those dreaded tape restore days to off site locations. I remember spending 72 hours + trying to restore machines to different hardware, struggle with different tape drive manufacturers and trying to find the right tape! I jumped ship from sys admin long ago and moved to EUC, avoiding the backup market like the plague in later years so I really was a fresh set of eyes to this age old conundrum.

Recently I stumbled across Altaro VM backup as part of my usual day to day readings and my interest was piqued. Withstanding that as a home lab owner and a hypervisor snob I really only run vSphere and Hyper-V was normally not something I enjoyed working with… I got talking to a nice gentleman from Altaro and I was invited to join the closed beta for vSphere.

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Citrix Receiver for Mac and British keyboard tomfoolery.

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Tomfoolery? indeed! Here is a problem that drove me nuts on a daily basis and I’m delighted to report the great Simon Frost and Dustin Norman of Citrix heard my cries of frustration and kindly resolved my issue outright. Stand up gentlemen they are!

My issue was simple, as a developer and powershell zealot, I regularly used the pipe Symbol (|) in anger. Well in anger i mean, I was literally angry as despite pressing the frickin pipe key, an imposter appeared in the remote console…

Looked like a pipe? Yes!
Acted like a pipe? NO!

So anyway, being a Citrix CTP has it’s benefits, I reached out to the aforementioned blokes and sure enough a few emails were exchanged and poof! issue resolved.

To paraphrase Dustins email:

Open ~/Library/Application Support/Citrix Receiver/Config in a text editor
Find the KeyboardLayout setting in the [WFClient] section
Change KeyboardLayout to: British
Save the file
Launch the session

Tada! Pipe back to normal. Thanks again Simon and Dustin.