Saturday, November 17, 2012

Accessing Citrix "ICA" for Mountain Lion - Citrix Receiver, not Citrix PlugIn or Citrix Access Gateway

This is a narrow-interest post, but if you are affected I can all but guarantee you will appreciate it.

Many hospitals and healthcare delivery systems using Epic provide physicians with remote access to the Epic EHR. HealthPartners in MN, where my wife works does this.

The HealthPartners site recommends installation of "Citrix ICA Client" for Windows. It doesn't say what to do for a Mac. We've used the "Citrix Online Plugin" for Snow Leopard for years, but it's no longer supported. We uninstalled it.

So what should one do? Should one install, for example, the beta version of Citrix Access Gateway with 10.8 support? 

Briefly - no. Download and install Citrix - Receiver for Mac 11.6 or later. Citrix has an abysmal web site, but it appears that the 'Access Gateway' product is largely obsolete. Receiver is a supported product and it worked with the HealthPartner's Citrix gateway.

It works, but that doesn't mean it's quality software. The installation failed from a User account, even after granting Admin rights. I had to uninstall and reinstall from an Admin account. (It's also possible that there were bits of old Citrix app remaining and the uninstaller cleaned them up -- but I'd unstable previously.)

3 comments:

Martin said...

I went through the same process a few weeks ago … :)

Citrix Receiver for iOS works much better than the OS X version, BTW … on the other hand, using a remote desktop on a small screen device is not my definition of fun either.

Do you know by chance how to get rid of the ServiceRecords process that comes with Citrix Receiver and wants to connect to Citrix on OS X startup?

John Gordon said...

I can't believe you did this too! I thought I was the only person in the world that would have to do it.

No, I hadn't noticed the ServiceRecords process. Citrix, like a lot of Adobe software, is really a form of malware.

Martin said...

I found the culprit:

- /LauchAgents/com.citrix.ServiceRecords.plist

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX134237 helped but I found the page only after I had manually told Google to search for ServiceRecords (my original search query) instead of Service Records (what made Google uf my original search query).