The IT Melting Pot!

Ok, I was just going to log in and play around and setup another AppController to verify some thoughts around a customer case in our EnvokeIT environment. And what did I do? I just opened my lovely Macbook Air (no one will ever take that one from me!!) and thought I would connect into our internal EnvokeIT lab environment and decided for some reason to connect over SSL VPN this time rather than running everything on the internally published desktop.

So I opened the browser and connected to our AGEE vip that presented me with the rather ok-looking login page as you can see here that my colleague modified to make it a bit more aligned with the StoreFront/Receiver for Web that we use in this little environment (otherwise you get that black ugly NetScaler login prompt, please get your product look & feel in synch Citrix!).

But then after I logged in I though that why not try out the SSL VPN client for my Mac! So I choose Network Access here;

And then I realised that the modifications weren’t really all ok as you can see here when I was prompted to download the Access Gateway Plugin for OS X (SSL VPN client)…

Of course that can or at least should be fixeable to align the look and feel. But why I’m writing this post is that I hoped that now when downloading the installer I could just launch the tunnel and get connected! No no.. first thing that happened when I clicked the installer to kick off the installation I was presented with this little popup that I of course just clicked OK on and wondered why the tunnel isn’t opened!

I clicked the installer again and just clicked OK (I did not read the message, who does?).. nothing happened again! And then of course I wondered what happened and finally read the message of the popup. The Citrix installer was NOT considered to be coming from an identified and trusted developer! Great Citrix, please fix though this will not be so popular amongst the end-users! 🙂

So then I knew what this was all about.. Gatekeeper didn’t like it and this had happened once before so I got back into Finder and right-clicked the installer and selected Open so I got this message prompt instead;

Now finally the installation kicked off! Yeah!

And then what happened?? Oooh yes! the tunnel is opening and I get the Growl installation prompt below.

I decided to go for it, I clicked Install and then I lost my network connection and half a second later, BOOM! OS X crashed…

The Mac restarted…

Then I got in again.. logged into AGEE VIP and thought that maybe it’s like in the Windows world that “stuff” just happens sometimes… but Nooo… 2nd time = same crash again! Hmmm….

Then all of a sudden I remembered what I said earlier today in a little discussion at work = SSL VPN connectivity is in the past, so legacy! Apps, Desktops, Data etc. should from now on just be delivered to any device without requirements on network connectivity into the enterprise! And I must agree with myself… now I just logged in the old way into my little XenApp published desktop (which also will be the legacy way of working I think for most in a couple of years) where I had my apps to play around and test some AppController stuff! Thx Citrix XenApp for saving me from the Citrix NetScaler/AGEE SSL VPN feature! 😉

Cheers!

//Richard