Systems administrators who are responsible for configuring and troubleshooting Group Policy are familiar with the uncertainty involved in this task. Once configured, a Group Policy Object is supposed to start affecting users and/or computers, but there is no quick and easy way to ensure that Group Policy is indeed active and working as expected. So …

A few days ago, we had a serious printing problem in our XenApp farm. We were initially alerted to a printing issue when the aggregated events count started to climb:

We looked at the events and noticed events like this one across 200 servers:

…

Windows Event Log is a valuable source of information, and it is usually my first stop, when diagnosing a server or desktop after a problem has occurred. What I would really like to have however is proactive monitoring capabilities – an Event Log that will draw my attention to a problem …

With XenApp 4.5/5.0 for Windows 2003 reaching end of life, it’s time to bid farewell to Citrix Resource Manager. Without getting too emotional, I think it’s safe to say Citrix RM was one of the best pieces of software Citrix has ever written. Citrix RM provided simple yet robust solutions for 2 major XenApp …

We are very excited to introduce ControlUp’s second major version. The first version has been out in the wild for a year and a half, during which we got plenty of feedback from excited admins, suggesting and demanding new features. A common theme was especially dominant in these feedbacks – a demand for ControlUp as …

A big day for all of us at Smart-X and hopefully for the entire SBC/VDI community! After a rigorous beta phase, today we released ControlUp 2.0 to the general public. Our existing (and new) customers are encouraged to upgrade to the new version and start enjoying the new features and enhancements.

ControlUp 2.0 is our first …

In this post we quickly address frequent questions we’ve been asked by many users of ControlUp these range from agent connectivity issues configuration questions, alerting and reporting capabilities and more.

Last week I had the pleasure to present and discuss ControlUp in a DABCC Live Webinar, the webinar was quite cool, with lots of interesting questions from the audience. The first part was a general discussion about the challenges that ControlUp solves and a quick overview of ControlUp 1.x capabilities, during the second …

Almost every Active Directory Domain has some service accounts such us BackupSVC, MonitorSVC, etc that are used to run Windows Services throughout the network.

Changing a password for such an account can be a real pain. A responsible admin should scan all servers and see where the account is being used. Otherwise, services are bound to …