unixwiz

Well I got tired of not having a good Citrix client for Solaris X86, and the one for MacOSX sucks because of the fixed window size. (The solaris sparc client lets you have seemless windows, but the MacOSX one doesn’t for some really stupid reason.)

Any ways, I decided to try and figure out how to get the JAVA Citrix Web client to run locally with out the need for a web server. Well tonight I figured it out, and it works so far for what I need. It does give one error on startup, but it does not affect the use of the client as far as I know.

So how do you do it? Pretty “easy”:

1. Download the Citrix JAVA client (I got 9.3) from Citrix’s web site, Note, it will say that you should not try to install it your self… well I can’t read that part
2. Unzip it in to a directory, I.E. /home/{userid}/citrix
3. Create an App script, for example this is what I use for accessing GroupWise (eck!) from Citrix:
   #!/bin/sh
   CLASSPATH="JICA-coreN.jar:JICA-browseN.jar:JICA-configN.jar:JICA-seamlessN.jar:JICA-clipboardN.jar:$CLASSPATH"
   export CLASSPATH
   /usr/bin/java  com.citrix.ConnectionCenter -address:CitrixICA.Server.Addrses -InitialProgram:"#GroupWise 65 SP4" \
   -HTTPBrowserAddress:CitrixICA.Server.Address -TWIMode:on -desiredcolor:4
4. The desiredcolor make is so that it uses the higher color palette, otherwise you get the nice 256 colors
5. TWIMode is for the Seamless windows
6. Initial Program is the name of the App that is published on the Citrix Server.

I tested this from my MacOSX 10.4.6 MacBookPro, and from my Solaris 10 x86 machine. Works fine on both. I will say though don’t tr to run it in TWM (I ran it through vnc), not fun to deal with right now. Hope this helps some other people who are missing a good client for each of these os’. I am going to see about drive mapping next.

I have decided to try and teach my self some java by using the free Sun Java Studio Creator 2 application. (My background is computer hardware engineering, so I never really played with Java while I was going through school. What I did get some what good at was Assembly, C, and Ada. Since I was not in Computer Science but rather in the Engineering school, they did not have us do any Java. Java was considered an elective, and when my time to take electives came around I did a lot of network hardware and network software electives. One of the classes I took was a class on network software programming. Having never done any socket programming before I took this class, it was sort of scary when on the first day the teacher says “your first project is to make a HTTP Proxy server, you have 2 weeks.” Needless to say it was one of the coolest classes I ever took at the university and probably one of the ones I learned the most in.) Anyways, I have decided to see if I can replicate my Syswatch web interface in JSP just as a proof of concept. It will probably take me a while as I said earlier I have 0 java/jsp experience.

99.9% of all the web apps I have written have been done in PHP. I have been using PHP since version 2, when is it called PHP/FI… I wrote a couple of apps that would help manage DNS and DHCP for a department I was working in at the time. We had about 10,000 IP’s and I found the easiest way to keep inventory of them was to build a web based front in to a MySQL DB and have it control BIND and DHCP. Later on I rewrote the entire thing to support dynamic registration of PC’s that the students brought to the dorms. Needless to say, PHP is the language that I use for pretty much any web app I have been doing lately.

So I downloaded Java Studio Creator 2 last night and set it up on my fastest machine (which is running windows at the moment). Installed MySQL and copied over a copy of my Syswatch DB. I have been able to get a table to display some of the content from the database, all with out reading any manuals yet. So we will see how far I can get before I get stuck.