Some profile management solutions store the user profiles in ways that differ from standard roaming profiles. On of those differences may be the user registry hive is not saved as ntuser.dat, but with the name of the user as the file name. This means that if UserA had his profile managed by such a profile management solution, he would have a UserA.dat in his user store instead of a ntuser.dat. Until now Profile Nurse would not have been able to find this registry hive and therefore the profile.

With this new version Profile Nurse will look for registry hives that have the same name as the user profile folder and handle these profiles, too. This will provide compatibility for those who have their profiles stored with this structure.

The other new feature allows for variabilization of registry value data. You might find yourself in a situation in which you need to modify registry values in a large number of profiles. The catch is that the new value data must contain the name of the profile folder. This would have prevented you from using Profile Nurse, but this new version provides a simple solution to the problem: It is now possible to use the <PROFILE_DIR> variable in data declarations of registry values. If specified, the variable will be replaced with the current user profile folder name during creation or modification of registry values.

You can download the new version with these features and some minor bug fixes here or in the information tab on top of this article.

Download the new version here (click on the tab “Download” at the top of the page”).

Guide to using DiskLED

Download the program.

Unzip it to a folder of your liking. Use any folder, but preferably use one where you have write access with your regular user account, or DiskLED will be unable to save its configuration file (yep, it stores it in the location of the EXE file).

Run DiskLED. If you are on a non-English system, it will show an error message. Ignore that for now (just click on OK as you always do

Double-click the new icon in the system tray (next to the clock). If you do not see a new icon and are on Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2, configure Explorer to show DiskLED’s icon.

A configuration dialog should pop up that looks like the following:

(Before you ask: the tool is in English, not in German! But it displays localized counter names and descriptions.)

To select a different data source:

1. Select a performance object. The default is: PhysicalDisk.
2. Select a performance counter. The default is: % Disk Time.
3. Select an instance (if the object is a disk, the instance specifies which disk to monitor). The default is: _Total (sum of all disks).
4. Click on “Build path from selection”. This validates the selection and writes the resulting performance counter path into the dialog box below.
5. Configure other settings, such as the icon to display.
6. It might also be a good idea to tell DiskLED how to interpret the values from the selected performance counter. Let us say you chose the counter “Current Disk Queue Length”. That counter returns the number of requests for disk activity currently on hold because the disk is busy. DiskLED has no way of knowing which queue length value is low, and which value is high. You tell it by entering the appropriate maximum value corresponding to 100% utilization. In case of “Current Disk Queue Length” that would be 2 (on systems with one hard disk, no RAID etc.).
7. If you just want to play around with performance counters, do not check “Update the INI file” but click on apply instead. The new settings take effect immediately.
8. Once you are satisfied with the configuration, check “Update the INI file” and then click on apply or OK. You are done.
9. It might be a good idea to have DiskLED start up automatically when logging on to Windows.

Requirements, Gotchas and Notes

• DiskLED does not require admin rights.
• No installation necessary. DiskLED runs from whatever location you put it in.
• DiskLED is much more accurate than typical hardware LEDs.
• DiskLED looks for its configuration (INI) file in the folder where you put the executable. If it cannot find the INI file there, it uses built-in default settings. Those settings are localized (they depend on the OS language). So, if you get the following error message when starting DiskLED “InitPDH: PdhAddCounter failed with: 0xc0000bb8″ and the tool only displays a red exclamation mark in the system tray: double-click that exclamation mark and select a performance counter in your system’s language.
• If you do not see any icon (nothing happens) after starting DiskLED: if you are running Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 make sure that you have configured Explorer to show all icons in the system tray, or configure Explorer to show DiskLED’s icon.
• DiskLED should run on any Windows client or server operating system beginning with Windows XP.

Download

Download DiskLED here.

What’s new in Version 1.0.1?

Some users needed a command line version to be able to process the results in scripts. Therefore I created one program which contains both, the GUI and the command line version.

Here is the command line output if you call SID2Username with the -h parameter:

There are some minor changes in the user interface including a direct link to the sepago blog web site. If you open the about box (in the system start menu) sepago’s web site is opened when clicking on the sepago logo.

Screenshot:

Download the newest version.

DiskLED is a little application that sits in the system tray and flickers whenever the hard disk is accessed. It looks like this:

That could be all there is to say, but I decided to make the tool a little more flexible.

Flexibility

DiskLED queries performance counters for disk activity data. Basically, what it does is periodically query a specific counter and display the current value graphically. The cool thing is it is not limited to hard disk activity data. Using a simple INI file, DiskLED can be configured to display any counter’s data.

Obviously an LED type display is well-suited for activity data only. When dealing with many other counters, a different visualization method is needed. Here you go: DiskLED has a second display mode, similar to how Task Manager shows CPU utilization. It can be used to display the disk queue length, for example, and looks like this:

When dealing with remoting protocols like RDP or ICA one generally tries to reduce screen updates to a minimum. For that reason the frequency with which DiskLED updates its icon can be configured freely.

Usage

DiskLED comes as a standalone EXE file. No need to install anything. If you run the executable all by itself, it uses the following built-in parameters:

• Display mode: flickering LED (first example shown above)
• Performance counter used as data source (localized!): \PhysicalDisk(_Total)\% Disk Time
• Update interval: 30 ms

So if you have an English version of Windows and just need a HDD activity LED, there is nothing you need to do except run DiskLED.

Configuration

If there is anything you want to modify, create a text file, name it DiskLED.ini and put it in the same folder as the executable. A sample INI file is included in the download. Here are two different configurations for reference purposes:

Default configuration, but for a German system:

The second sample configuration uses a bar-style display mode to display the disk queue length (\PhysicalDisk(_Total)\Current Disk Queue Length). It updates every 500 ms only. With this display mode, you have to tell DiskLED which numerical value corresponds to 100% utilization. In the case of disk queue length, this is typically 2 on single-disk systems:

Download

Download DiskLED here.

Once you have tried it out, let me know what you think of DiskLED and how it can be improved by commenting on this article.

A possible application for this is the migration from standard roaming profiles to Profile management by Citrix. Let’s say your v1 roaming profiles are located in C:\Data\Profiles and you want to prepare UPM profiles in the user store in C:\Data\UserStore. Here’s my command sequence to do so for the Documents directory:

[GeneralSettings]
UserProfileDir=”C:\Data\Profiles\<PROFILE_DIR>”

[FileSystemCopyDirectory]
SourcePath=”Documents”
DestinationPath=”C:\Data\UserStore\<PROFILE_DIR>\UPM_Profile\Documents_upm_var”
CreatePathIfDoesNotExist=”1″

Note the usage of <PROFILE_DIR> in the target directory parameter creating a new directory for each processed user. The target directory name ends with _upm_var as this is the user store structure for v1 profiles in UPM.

So here is my next version including some minor bugs fixes. You’ll find all changes in the change log and the updated manual and sample.ini. Enjoy!

Profile Nurse

Download.

Here’s the full video on Citrix TV.

Enjoy!

The whole article is available in my personal blog.

So here I am in a new version with the ability to exclude files and folders in deletion operations. Other changes include additional command line output and file system query result improvements.

Feel free to download my newest version and tell us what you like and what is missing.

As an administrator of Citrix products it is sometimes necessary to analyze the contents of one’s license file(s). This requires manual parsing, a very tedious process. To illustrate this point here is the relevant portion of a typical license file (digital signature obliterated for obvious reasons):

See what I mean?

ParseCitrixLicense

To simplify license file analysis, I have written the tool ParseCitrixLicense. It takes a license file like the one above and displays the contents in a human-readable form:

As you can see, each field from the license file is shown with a short description and, where appropriate, a remark.

What is Missing

I have not (yet) been able to decipher all entries. I encourage anyone to point me into the right direction by commenting on this article. As soon as I figure out the meaning of the remaining fields I will post an updated version of ParseCitrixLicense.

These are the fields ParseCitrixLicense does not understand yet:

• ODP=0
• AP=ADMIN/LOGON/-84D:NONADMIN/LOGON/-28D, or

  AP=ADMIN/LOGON/-28D:NONADMIN/LOGON/ALW, or

  AP=ADMIN/LOGON/ALW:NONADMIN/LOGON/-7D

• CCUDURMIN=90

  (1.5 hours?)

• CCUDURMAX=525600

  (365 days?)

Download and Requirements

ParseCitrixLicense requires the .NET framework 2.0. It is a command line tool that expects the path to a license file as the first (and only) argument. If called without parameters the following help screen will be shown:

I have tested ParseCitrixLicense with various license files for Presentation Server 3.0, 4.0, 4.5 and XenApp 5.0. In case of problems please comment on this article.

The original version of this article is available on my blog.