Support - Tips and Tricks

How to Boot a Citrix Access Gateway 4.5.8 with Linux

The updates to the Citrix Access Gateway (CAG) software have improved the 'click and customize' options available to administrators. For example you can very easily modify the labels that the password fields show at the login screen. However you will find that there comes a time when the modifications you want to make are not standard customizations available from the administration tools. This means that may have to resort to manually changing the web pages on the CAG file system itself. This can be achieved by booting the CAG with a live Linux distribution CD, mounting the CAG's file system and modifying the files.

I downloaded and used the latest Ubuntu Live CD for this procedure on my CAG 4.5.8. Other 'Live' Linux distributions can be used. This procedure is also very similar on older versions of the CAG with slight changes in file system names.

Solution/Workaround

How to boot a CAG 4.5.8 using a Ubuntu Live CD. In the following procedure I was modifing the initial login page on my CAG but you could modify any of the files, or add your own.

Please Note that Citrix do not suggest manually modifying the code within the AG and it breaks the EULA.

- Download and burn a Linux Live CD (I used Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, my instructions will assume you've done the same)
- Connect a Video, Keyboard and Music to the CAG if not already connected.
- Restart the CAG with the Ubuntu CD in the drive.
- Start the Terminal application (Application/Accessories/Terminal)
- Enter sudo mkdir /cag to create a folder to mount the CAG hard drive to
- Enter sudo mount /dev/sda1 /cag to mount the CAG hard drive to the cag folder
- Enter sudo nautilus and a File System Explorer will launch with Root privileges
- Browse to File System - cag/runtime/S0/etc
- Find login.html, right click and select 'Open with Text Editor'
- Make the changes required to the Login page (a basic HTML knowledge is required)
- Save the login.html
- Obviously you could do a more with the image files and other html files at this point.
- Shutdown the Ubuntu (System/Quit/Shutdown)
- Remove the CD and switch the CAG back on

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