I had heard so much about how screw up Citrix Metaframe was and the amount of problem it has brought about. I am still seeing a lot of big company using it. Why can't they just use Remote Desktop or NetOp? Or FCS, even PCAnywhere? Cheaper, lighter and lots less problems... Anyway, this is a horrifying tales where Murphy's Law totally applies.
It was a plain and simple upgrade from Citrix Metaframe XP to Citrix Metaframe 4.0. We are not even talking about 4.5 which is the newest yet... In additional, this is a really screw up HP Proliant D380 G3 which is running Windows 2003 Standard without any patching... So first step is to backup.
HP Proliant D380 :
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Home.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=316529
HP Data Protector is plain and simple, yet not a good choice due to the imaging is so bad. It actually requires you to have Data Protecter installed before you can recover. Er... Thats so totally off the point for imaging... Next, will try True Image Server, somehow something on the machine is preventing it from sucessfully installing. This is a know issue anyway. OK, lets do System State. Emm cannot run. Probably no SP1 thats why. Ok, V2i or Symantec Backup Exec as its know today. Guess what, its a USB 1.0 speed!!! Will take hours to complete the stupid 10GB backup. So no more backup, just whack on the RAID.
Pull one HDD out for backup and upgrade the other. Citrix went smoothly. Then to SP1 for Windows Server 2003. Then reboot. And Reboot. And Reboot. Yes, WTF... Just a simple SP1 also screwed up. Time to recover. Drove all the way back to grab Wininternals ERD Commander 2005 DVD. Push it in and hope.
Blink Blink Blink... Nothing. WTF again! Its not even a DVDROM! Its a stone age CDROM inside! So try and try no way to remove the stupid driver that hanged. Have to unRAID it. Put back the old HDD and resync. Then up Citrix again. This time forget about SP1 (Kids, DO NOT DO THIS AT ALL, Windows Server 2003 is not even safe at all.). Now, Citrix connection testing...
Server connect OK. Apps totally failed. What happened? No idea. The rest of the night and day I spent was trying to debug this stupid issue. I put the old HDD back with Citrix XP, everything works. Same client, same IP, same firewall. Just wont work in 4.0. Now, not even a Citrix Cert Tech can tell me whats the problem. This continues over the next one and a half day messing with network etc... In the end. Roll back.
So think again when you talk about Citrix Metaframe. For me, hopefully, this is the last time I will do it.
No comments:
Post a Comment