I’d read a comment somewhere that insisted that tech pros should work to refute the claims made by shops like ‘computertraining.com’ that have been pummeling the radio.  I’d long thought that no one could believe that ad on it’s face, but apparently someone does as the place is still in business.

The wage claim by itself is false on it’s face.  It’s true that many MCSEs may make “$50,000 or more”, but only after a bit of experience and an aptitude that goes well beyond the certification.  Most people I’ve known (including myself) have gotten such certifications in order to show already obtained knowledge and (probably even more importantly) the initiative to go beyond the bare work requirements of their current job.  My best guess was that if someone managed to get Microsoft’s current equivalent of the MCSE with no experience, they might find someone who is willing to take a chance on them for $10 a hour, with those that are actually talented being able to double that rather quickly (a year or two at least).

Beyond that, a little Google search turns up repeated claims that the training offered by computertraining.com is around $20,000 which is, to put very mildly, an enormous sum.  As a comparison the going out-of-pocket costs for the tests themselves are no more than $1000 combined, and for the extra ambitious the training can be free.  Microsoft posts summaries of the content that appears on the exam and a method I’d used in the past was to download demos of the software (assuming full copies wouldn’t be available) and then learn all I could about the bullet points pertaining to the exam (with some Technet troubleshooting articles thrown in for good measure).

On that note, my personal feeling would be that if you did pay computertraining.com $20,000 for your certification, I probably wouldn’t think very much of your qualifications.  There’s no reason to use them, and every reason to avoid them.

To every salesman who cold calls and cold e-mails me I have a message: I know your situation, but there’s nothing I can do for you.  No, I can’t answer your call to talk for a minute, because it easily turns into five after I sit through your pitch.  No, I do not owe you a ‘courtesy callback’ just because you were one of the many who have left me a voicemail.  As well, I have no interest in any of the following: resold telco services, rebuilt toner cartridges, or ‘scrap’ dealers looking for six month old computer gear.  My place of work has needed contracting services in the past which were typically attached to some piece of software, I myself haven’t needed the services of a generic technical consultant for nearly a decade, so those too are a waste of time.   On that note, I particularly don’t care for cold calls from consulting firms that aren’t even in my state.

I have a soft spot for many of these companies as I used to work for consulting companies.  Even now my job depends on the ability of our sales staff to cajole customers into either buying our products or buying more of them.  One vendor in particular, from whom I have bought no products from ever, has been cold calling me once every week or two for ten years.  About five years ago I tried to tell them to give it up but they’ve persisted.  Needless to say I’ve been through generations of sales people; every six months it’s a different voice that’s desperate to get a sale, any sale, from my disembodied voicemail call tag.

Unfortunately you cold-callers, since we migrated to a new voicemail system many years ago I now use it to expedite your voicemails right into the digital void, never to be heard, ever.  I wish I had it in me to manage a half dozen vendor relationships, but we do not have that much business and what we do have I need to use as a carrot for our occasional goofy request from our vendor with whom we have a long term trusted relationship.

For quite a while I had an issue on one of our Citrix servers (let’s call it termserv1) where I was receiving “This patch package could not be opened”/”Package corrupt” errors when trying to install patches for Presentation Server 4.0.  Since the server doesn’t hang directly off the Internet I had put off fixing it for several years in the not unrealistic hope that I might one day be able to ‘upgrade’ out of the issue.

Our other Citrix servers are quite a bit more important and they had to be patched.  After every patch I waited for something bad to happen where the newly patched boxes would have some communication issue with the unpatched server.  I had gotten lucky for a long time, but this past week my luck finally ran out when I installed the version 6 hotfix rollup (what will probably be the last hotfix rollup for Presentation Server 4.0).  The ‘good’ servers reported that they were unable to contact the licensing server.  I figured, somewhat incorrectly as it turns out, that the issue was related to the fact that the termserv1, which was the license server, had not been patched.

The reason I had put off fixing the issue is that the fix was rather non-existent.  The first step was to delete the Presentation Server install entries by using the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility.  The second step was to re-install Presentation Server (which for me also required renaming the files ‘ctxdwavo.exe’ and  ‘mfreg.exe’ AND rebooting).  The third step was to hope for the best, and barring that, to fix whatever didn’t work, which in this case meant pretty much everything.

The core issue was that termserv1 was the main server that I relied on in our transition from MetaFrame 1.8 to Presentation Server 4.0 and it had taken quite a bit of work and a long phone call to Citrix to get all of the licensing pieces to work.  From that point on I relied on termserv1 to be the master browser/data collector and main license server.  As it turned out, the licensing issue was related to the fact that the licensing service from Citrix is not patched with hotfix updates and is in fact a separate download.  However, after reinstalling on termserv1 the ICA browser was not working and the server would refuse direct connections with either ‘Protocol Driver Error’ or  just ‘cannot connect to the Citrix XenApp server’  both of which can be an indication of almost any issue.

Emboldened, I decided to uninstall Presentation Server (now that the installer was working) and reinstall.  The uninstall went fine, however when I went to reinstall it refused to join a farm without a SQL database link (we use the included Access database).  I wound up having to selectively restore the unpatched Citrix back onto the box.  After the restore the browser worked again, but ICA connections to the server did not.  Figuring that I would just have to fight my way through it I reapplied the patch and set out to find out what was wrong.

Since I was getting the unhelpful errors from the XenApp client I decided to see if I could get the web interface working to the point that I could get a helpful error or two.  This turned out to be a day long time sink; getting the antiquated version of the Citrix web functions working on a newer server (Win2k3 r2) whose own version of Presentation server wasn’t working anyway, was asking too much given the immediacy of the need to get the server back into full operation again (although it hosts production applications, they’re used sparingly).  I got to the point of getting the “exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation” when trying to create a new web server before giving up.

Frustrated, I turned back to the regular clients.  My first plan of attack was the fact that pointing the XenApp client at one of the two ‘good’ server worked, and termserv1 didn’t, which told me that there was a browser issue of some sort.  Somewhere along the line I came across a Citrix forum post that suggested deleting and recreating the ICA connection.  After doing that the published items still didn’t work, but direct connections did!  After running ‘query farm /load’ I discovered that termserv1 and the other two servers didn’t really see themselves in the same farm (‘query server’ would return all the servers, but ‘query farm /load’  would return incomplete lists).  I performed some actions with ‘dscheck’ and ‘dsmaint failover’, but the real fix (I think) was going into the farm properties in the MetaFrame management console and toggling the affinity between the servers.  Before doing that the servers had two different affinity sets.  Setting it one place made it consistent and everything in Program Neighborhood began working properly.

*UPDATE: If any of the above is helpful it’s a coincidence.  After rebooting termserv1 the IMA service failed to come back up and the management console was inaccessible on any of the servers.  I hacked around for the better part of a (Sun)day, but as it was closing in on midnight I threw in the towel and rebuilt the farm.  I was at least able to rely on a screen shot I had taken as a business continuity hedge so that I’d know which apps I had to rebuild.

As I scroll through them each new message spins up from the bottom of the screen in what looks like a tornado of whirling letters before coalescing into a readable message. however as soon as I want to reply or get more information the TouchFlo interface disappears and I’m shoved into windows. This is true for each and every one of the phones features. contacts, programs, email all of it. It all looks great for about a second but as soon as you try to actually use any of this stuff the facade disappears and you’re navigating through f*****g windows.