Lab Question

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You are the administrator of a farm in Memphis consisting of five servers. You have just installed Microsoft Office 2000 on your servers, and the application is load-balanced across all of them. You want to roll out the application to a new group of users in Rhode Island, and you want to ensure that they see this application in their Default view when the Program Neighborhood client is installed.

Your servers are located behind a firewall on your local LAN in Memphis. Your users will be dialing up to the Internet, and then connecting to the server farm. You will be having the local administrator in Rhode Island install Program Neighborhood on the users' Windows 2000-based PCs. Configure the client software so that after installing the client, there will be no problems connecting to the application set when the end users launch Program Neighborhood for the first time.

Answers

 

This scenario poses several problems: ensuring connectivity through the firewall, making sure the client connections are efficient for dial-up, and setting the Default view to the new Application Set.

The easiest way to configure a custom PN client is to first install the client on a similar client machine, customize the client, and then copy the appropriate .ini files to the installation source. After you have installed the client on a Windows 2000 machine, create a connection to the new application set. A good way to emulate the situation in Rhode Island would be to use a dial-up connection to the Internet on the machine you will be configuring. That way, you will know if the connection works or not.

When you configure your connection to the application set, you will need to select your protocol, which will be TCP/IP or TCP/IP+HTTP if you are connecting using the Citrix XML service on port 80. Remember, you will need to set an alternate address on your ICA browser using the altaddr.exe command and configuring your firewall to recognize this address if you are using NAT. After you have entered your ICA browser or browsers in the Address list using the Servers… button in the wizard, you will need to click the check box for Use Alternate Address For Firewall Connection, which can be found under the Firewalls… button.

You will want to make sure data compression, bitmap caching, and possibly SpeedScreen is turned on for the new application set by checking the properties. SpeedScreen can be used with very slow dial-up connections to make the session appear to be faster. Turn off client audio remapping unless absolutely necessary.

After you have set up the connection, you will need to right-click the Application Set icon in the Application Set Manager view and select Set As Default. This will ensure that this application set will be their Default view when they launch the program for the first time.

When your configuration is complete, you will need to copy the four files from your client installation to your installation source for your Rhode Island administrator. These files will be Appsrv.ini, Module.ini, Pn.ini, and Wfclient.ini. You will need to rename the .ini extensions to .src for your installation set.

When this is complete, uninstall Program Neighborhood from your client machine and install your newly created custom client. It is always good to test your settings before you roll it out. This way you know if everything is working properly or if you need to make any changes.

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