New technologies require new tweaks

Some parts within your infrastructure resides on the same technology for many years. Where software vendors introduce many fancy new features and enhancements some parts will remain quite the same for a relative long period. Lucky for us IT administrators, we don’t have to redesign everything when upgrading the infrastructure.

The last decade using an ICA passthrough session was easily configured within RES PowerFuse, relying on a Citrix passtrough client, the good old Program Neighborhood, where we launched an ICA file for starting the passthrough application.

Nowadays more customers are migrating to the newest Citrix XenApp version, and subsequently introducing the Citrix online plugin as passthrough client.
At our Support department we have seen some side effects, therefore some new  tweaks had to be found to let our customers do what they are used to do for many years.

The Citrix online plugin used as passthrough client introduced two issues with the same root cause. Because of the intelligence of the Citrix online plugin the passthrough session is now started with the client name of the original client, not the client name of the server where the first session was started.

This is causing two issues:
1. SessionGuard fails where “Always allow passthrough sessions” is incorrectly detected
2. Zones (Powerzones) not passed through to the second session: “Backtrack passthrough sessions  to originating client for zones” not applied

We have found a tweak to let the Citrix Online plugin pass the local server name instead of the original client name:

x32 Registry Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Citrix\ICA Client\PASS THROUGH
x64 Registry Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Citrix\ICA Client\PASS THROUGH
Value Name: PASS THROUGH
Value Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 0 (default value is 1)

Now you will see:

And within RES PowerFuse User Workspace Analysis passthrough is detected:

Also SessionGuard is now behaving as expected for passthrough sessions.
This behavior will be further investigated to create a nice solution but in the meantime this can be helpful for you.
As far in our test environment I have seen no side effects of this change (please let me know if there are..), but as always: TEST before applying in your production environment.