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Citrix' Free Solution For Hot-Plugging USB Memory: DynamicUSB

Wednesday, 25 April 2007 by Michel Roth

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that there was a Citrite who developed a tool to deal with dynamic USB in Citrix environments. At first he did not want to release the tool. He wanted to wait and see if there was any interest. I recommended we'd spam him till death so that he would (be allowed to) make the tool available. Well, apparently it helped!

This tool, called DynamicUSB, is now available on the Citrix Developer network. This is still an unsupported tool though but it's better than nothing. Notice that this tool does exactly the same as the tool that my colleague Dennis Damen used to create his own Dynamic USB solution (which kind of got this whole thing going) but the difference is that Citrix offers this solution, DynamicUSB, for free. The tool only works on WindowsXP and with NTFS drives. The utility maps every USB storage device to a predetermined location on the client harddisk. It then basicly utilizes Citrix client drive mapping to make this predefined folder available in the Citrix session.

"DynamicUSB allows you to access a USB drive in a Presentation Server session in situations where the device is connected to a client system after the Presentation Server session is established.

The utility creates a directory under C:\CitrixUSBStore in the client file system for each USB drive that is inserted into the client device. This linked directory reflects the contents of the USB drive; thus, all directories and files in the USB drive appear as directories and files under the linked directory. If the USB key is subsequently removed, the utility deletes the corresponding link directory. "

Check it out (you will need a MyCitix or CDN account).