One of the most annoying things that can happen to you is making changes to the wrong NetScaler. I don’t know about you, but it happens to me from time to time because I usually have several NetScalers open at the same time, ideally NetScalers with identical configurations: the test environment, the integration environment and the production environment.
Experiments and trials in the production environment are not particularly popular with users (I dare not even think of my client), especially if they go really wrong. On the other hand, they usually don’t mind at all if I mess something up in the test environment.
So I needed a way of labeling or tagging my NetScalers. The easiest way to do this is to replace the favicon.
Replacing the favicon is very easy. It is stored in the file system. Caution: It will be overwritten with every update!
Attention: This method is not supported by Citrix and should therefore not be used for a production system.
As my college Jan Tygat mentioned: ADM’s security advisory will find these manipulated files, as it will compare hashes of all existing files to a list of hashes it has and probably send an alert.
Changing the appearance of a Citrix NetScaler ADC
Changing Citrix NetScaler’s favicon
The icon can be found at /var/netscaler/gui/admin_ui/common/images/favicon.ico. The only thing you have to do is downloading the icon, change it’s appearance and upload it again. I used gimp for this, but MS-Pailt will do as well, if you prefer using Windows.
Just on my way to change these admin-UI favicons I also found the icons used by the VPN. They are in /var/netscaler/gui/vpns/navui/images/.
Changing the header-colour
My screenshot got a changed header-colour as well. This can be done by editing /var/netscaler/gui/admin_ui/rdx/core/css/rdx.css.gz. This gz-file just contains a single css file, rdx.css. Search for –color-black:#000 and replace it with a colour of your choice (mine is #006400).
Changing the favicon on a Citrix ADM
Similar to Citrix NetScaler, the ADM stores it’s icon at /var/mps/gui/admin_ui/mas/ent/favicon.ico.
Nice one. Because I don”t want to reupload the changed one after a future update I copied the custom ico file to “/var/customization/favicon.ico” and added the line “cp /var/customization/favicon.ico /var/netscaler/gui/admin_ui/common/images/favicon.ico” to the file “/nsconfig/rc.netscaler”. Voila!
You are right! I am rather busy right now, but I thought of this (but didn’t give it a try).