Recently, I came across a question: When did the STA go down? How can we find out? Well, that’s easy to tell, as it gets logged. Unfortunately, the log isn’t that easy to understand. And, of course, like all logs in Citrix NetScaler, it disappears in a bit more than a day due to logfile rollover. Where do we search for these logs? Like always, my first source is Syslog. In a...
This might sound like an idea from an overcautious paranoid guy. But it’s not: My customer is in a very sensitive business. The problem Somebody may scan the internet for open ports and, by random, connect to my customer’s IP. This person will send a request and see my customer’s gateway. He might get curious, even though the gateway is not branded at all and the hostname is not...
It’s one of the things I do most often: Import a customer’s NetScaler installation into a VPX, so I can have a look at it. In fact, I do most of my audits that way. What is required The best basis would be a Citrix NetScaler backup. It contains everything we need, except for certificates, together with some other data in addition, like logs. The ns.conf file, alone, would be...
Notepad++ is widely used by Windows administrators. The reason is, Notepad++ is not just a good editor, it also allows to “understand” different languages, like HTML, CSS, Java, Pearl and many more. My friend and fellow CCI (Citrix trainer) at that time, Christian Schwendemann (now Citrix employee), created NetScaler definitions for Notepad++. He sent it to me, but I found several...
Usually, we create profiles in a test environment. After thoughtful testing, we have to copy them to the production and the DR site. Requirements: Test, production and DR site have to be exactly the same version, or the import will fail. The user has to be able to use the shell (so it has to be equivalent to nsroot) Exporting a profile The profile can get exported at any time. This can be done...
No doubt, monitoring a WAF is an important thing to do. It helps to find attacks and their sources for forensic purposes and is needed to find false positives as well. How to do it? Citrix NetScaler WAF logs locally, that’s great for real-time logging and trouble shooting, but it may also log to external sources like Citrix Application Delivery Manager (ADM), that’s great for long...
WordPress is one of the most popular web publishing software, both in the private and commercial sectors. While the private sector will hardly use a Citrix NetScaler ADC, not to mention, Citrix Firewall, it is rather common in the commercial world. This page will focus on a simple, robust deployment. It requires advanced (enterprise) or premium (platinum) editions of Citrix NetScaler ADC. It’s...
In my day-to-day work (audits, project management, project oversight, architecture, …), I usually see Citrix NetScaler ADCs administered by someone else. In my audits, one of my first steps is checking for a consistent naming scheme. NetScalers tend to be chaotic if naming is chaotic. Of course, one can argue that the naming of objects is not essential, but for me, it is also a gauge of how...
The problem Funny enough (or frustrating enough), an http-ecv monitor won’t work with JSON-based replies on a Citrix ADC / NetScaler. It will not find any data in an HTTP response and fail. WTF? The reason The http-ecv monitor requires the http-response to be of MIME-Type text (usually text/html). JSON data, however, is application/json. That’s why it does not work. The solution There...
Sometimes, we need specific attributes like an E-Mail address or the userPrincipalName to be passed from a SAML IDP to the SP. If you use a Citrix ADC / NetScaler as SAML IDP, it is, indeed, an easy thing to do. Let’s have a look. Extracting attributes from LDAP The first step, of course, is always to retrieve an attribute from LDAP. This is done via an LDAP policy. I won’t go into...