Can't connect to Citrix Program Neighborhood over Cisco VPN

[eastbr]

Hello,

We would like to use our PIX firewall VPN to faclitate connection to our Metaframe server for remote users. The ICA traffic seems to have trouble traversing the VPN tunnel.
Does someone know what settings we can enable that will allow the ICA traffic to flow?

Thanks,
Brent

 

[Dublin73]

Hi Brent, the remote Citrix users, are they connecting to you through a "site to site" VPN between two PIX firewalls, or do they have the "Cisco VPN Client" software installed?

Both of these approaches will work for ICA. I've set up both in the past, but didn't have to do anything special regarding ICA traffic.

I presume you can ping the Citrix server from the client?

Can you access the Citrix servers through a remote desktop connection (RDP)?

 

[eastbr]

Our employees are using the Cisco VPN client to connect.

I can't ping but I think that is just a matter of the PIX not allowing ping.

I can access the Citrix server via RDP using the internal IP address just fine.

Curiously I can also connect to the Citrix server via a custom ica connection. It is just accessing the published application set that fails.

Thanks for your help.

 

[Dublin73]

if you can access the Citrix server via an ICA connection, you've just proved that ICA traffic is traveling to and from the client.

it's unlikely that your problem is at the PIX.

What error do the users get when accessing the Published applications? What happens when these same users try to access the Published Applications from the LAN?

 

[eastbr]

It was a protcol error. I was able to resolve it by setting the network protocol to tcp/ip and adding the citrix servers LAN IP to the address list.

For some reason the autodetect network protocol setting works on the custom ica connections, but not the published applications.

In your opinion is there any performance gained using an ICA custom connection rather than the RDP client for those users who need a full desktop connection?

 

[Dublin73]

If you're talking about a Citrix server and client on the same local LAN, visually, there's no difference between RDP and ICA. Some people would say otherwise... myself I don't see it. ICA works much better for the remote clients though.

I presume we're talking about 1 Citrix server? If there's more than one server, then you'd likely want to go with ICA, as you'll get all the nice stuff that Citrix provides, proper load balanced applications etc..

good luck!