Strange citrix issue, sessions start, however users never connect.

[defekt]

there seems to be some ongoing issue with my primary citrix server, so I have disabled logins to this server for now. Basically, if I reboot it, it will work normally for a couple days, then people will start complaining that they can't connect - their sessions get established and started up on the primary citrix server but they (the users) never get connected to the session. So for example, in the list on that server - you'll see a user with like 5 or 6 sessions of Outlook running, all in disconnected states. Eventually, all these open but disconnected sessions suck up memory and degrade the performance for users that are actually already on the server still. Even if I clear them, the problem just comes back unless I slowly ween people off that server and reboot it once there is no one on it.

The secondary citrix server is not affected, and of course if a user is lucky enough to get placed on that server while the primary one is having issues, the the secondary citrix server users are unaffected.

The setup on both machines are identical. We have about 65 citrix users.

We are using Citrix Metaframe XPA Service release 3 both primary and secondary servers are using 2000 SP4 with all patches current.

 

[ascotta]

You want to be setting settings for disconnected sessions that will reset them after a period of time. It could also be a matter of user education, users will see "disconnect" as logging off. run MFCFG from start/Run and set the settings there for disconnected sessions.

[blue]Arguably the best cat skinner around ! [/blue]

Cheers
Scott

 

[defekt]

Well the disconnected sessions we would prefer to stay open since some users have poor connections and it's easier for them to just pop back in to the metaframe application list. I'd like to mention that the disconnected sessions do not affect the secondary citrix server.

Also, this issue started about 3-4 weeks ago when we switched over to XPA SR3 vs XPS.

 

[defekt]

Found this hotfix. It looks appropriate. Hope I don't have to stay on the phone with them forever.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;824309

 

[defekt]

Another follow up to this issue:

I found that the above hotfix had already been applied. There are two other applicable hotfixes that I believe are required in this situation, you can find them here:

http://support.citrix.com/kb/entry.jspa?externalID=CTX102523

This is a very good article which covers currently known issues with Citrix and Windows 2000 Server with SP4. I'm going to apply these patches as I have verified they are newer then my current files versions. I will have to wait a few days to see the results from the patching, but afterwards I will post to see if this worked.

I hope this helps anyone else currently experiencing this issue.
-Mike

 

[ascotta]

Sounds like the problem to me.

[blue]Arguably the best cat skinner around ! [/blue]

Cheers
Scott