Publishing vworkspace HTML 5 connector behind Citrix Netscaler

Since the release of vworkspace 8.5 I’ve been wanting to try out the HTML 5 connector properly! we have a lab enviroment where we have it deployed and it works amazingly fast inside the local network.

But… I also want it available from outside our local network, therefore I decided to publish it using our Netscaler. Now the HTML 5 connector from Dell is like the one on Storefront, it runs on top of the web access server and we can use that as an proxy to access applications and desktops.

Now initially I wanted to publish the connector using SSL offloading, meaning that users could access the HTML 5 connector on a SSL enabled vServer and that Netscaler would do the SSL processing and the web access server would get non encrypted traffic via port 80 but… when I got this up and running all I got was error messages.

clip_image002

Didn’t see alot of useful info in the logs as well which could lead me to the error.

2015-01-20 08:59:45.078 – 844 – RdpProxy – ERROR – Server exception.

System.Net.Sockets.SocketException (0x80004005): An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host

   at Freezer.Common.Utils.readAll(Socket socket, Byte[]& data) in d:Build349vWorkspaceElblingSourcesSRCFreezerIISFreezerCommonUtils.cs:line 121

   at Freezer.Common.SocketStateObject.handleSocket(Object o) in d:Build349vWorkspaceElblingSourcesSRCFreezerIISFreezerCommonRdpServer.cs:line 160

2015-01-20 08:59:45.078 – 4780 – UserStatecbf3bb31-bd6e-7cdf-5e50-f21fccda8e4 – DEBUG –

2015-01-20 08:59:45.078 – 1000 – UserStatecbf3bb31-bd6e-7cdf-5e50-f21fccda8e4 – DEBUG –

2015-01-20 08:59:45.078 – 1692 – UserState – DEBUG – RDP ProcessExited for: [id_1421740273901]

2015-01-20 08:59:45.078 – 1692 – UserState – DEBUG – RDP ProcessExited: Cleaning up for [id_1421740273901]

2015-01-20 09:00:14.828 – 144 – UserStatecbf3bb31-bd6e-7cdf-5e50-f21fccda8e4 – DEBUG – Message received: AS00000704:      handle_print_cache( 00DEE778 )

2015-01-20 09:00:14.828 – 144 – UserStatecbf3bb31-bd6e-7cdf-5e50-f21fccda8e4 – DEBUG – 00000704:     ignoring an UPDATE PRINTER event

What I did see on the other hand was that my browser which was running the JS did try to open a connection directly to 443

clientSide: wss://demossoproxy.dsg-iam.com/vWorkspace/Freezer/api/Image?sessionId=id_1421175921207 (wss is SSL based websocket connection)

but since my web accesss server was running only on port 80 it didn’t work well. Therefore I changed the setup a bit. Instead of SSL offloading I tried with SSL bridging, so I moved the encryption back to the web access server and just used SSL multiplexing, which actually worked!

I’m guessing that the websocket connection requires the same port externally and internally, since I didn’t troubleshoot it anymore. So here Is a little clip of how fast the HTML5 connector for Dell vWorkspace is. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B35CAfqXUdY]

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