Cuesta College, one of the places I (Greg Porter) teach, only allows you to access your cuesta.edu email 2 ways. You can use their web based Outlook Web Access, which looks really lame and clunky if you’re not using Internet Explorer. (I use Firefox on Fedora.) The other way you can access your mail is by using Cuesta’s Citrix Presentation Server which uses the Citrix ICA Client plugin for your browser to get access to remote apps at Cuesta like Outlook or Office. (No other access methods are allowed, no POP, no IMAP, my mail is “stuck” on campus. I could launch into a rant about how silly that is, but I’ll do that another day.)
There’s a couple-three flaming hoops you have to jump through to get Firefox to use the ICA client…
(This worked for me on Fedora 9, your mileage may vary… I did these steps as root.)
The Citrix ICA client depends on OpenMotif, which apparently isn’t included in the default load of Fedora. I went to rpm.pbone.net and searched for Fedora packages for OpenMotif. I found this one. I then installed it with a ‘rpm -ivh ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/download.fedoralegacy.org/legacy/redhat/9/updates/i386/openmotif-2.2.2-14.2.legacy.i386.rpm’ command.
Once I had the dependency, I got the client itself from Citrix. They recently changed the names on all their stuff. Old docs say stuff like “get the Citrix ICA Client”. They now apparently call it “XenApp”. Whatever. I wandered around a bit on their web page to find the latest .rpm version of the Linux XenApp client. I clicked on the link and downloaded it to my /tmp directory.
Once I had the client in .rpm format, I installed it with a ‘rpm -ivh /tmp/ICAClient-10.6-1.i386.rpm’. (You may have a different version number, use the one you got, of course).
The client comes with the plugin for Firefox (netscape). You have to make a link from your Firefox plugins directory to the ICA client plugin. I googled around that seems to be a common thing to do. I basically followed this helpful page. I used the find command as suggested, and then changed to the Firefox plugins directory (for me, this was /usr/local/lib/netscape/plugins). I then made the link as suggested. For whatever reason, I could’t make symbolic link as suggested (ln -s) so I made a hard link (plain ol ln) with a ‘ln /usr/lib/ICAClient/npica.so npica.so’.
I restarted Firefox. I then entered ‘about:plugins’ as a URL and verified that Firefox could ‘see’ the ICA client plugin.
Then I tried to use it. It started to work (yay!) and then got an error that said “You have chosen not to trust the ‘Thawte Premium Server CA’ the issuer of the server security certificate”. Huh? Back to Google.
It appears that this too is a common thing. I downloaded the two certificates they have on their Citrix page andput them where they told me to put them. (I suppose they could be some alien hostile ‘evil’ certificates, but I choose not to believe that of the Stanford people).
Hey, Mikey! It works!
(Of course, if I could just POP my mail off the silly Cuesta mail server like most sane sysadmins allow people to do, I would have had to do all this crazy Citrix crap.
(Update – later in the day.) Just tried this on a 64 bit Fedora 10 install. It did *NOT* work. OpenMotif wants a bunch of 32 bit libraries, and I have 64 bit. I probably could make a bunch of links but why bother. Geez. Can I have POP or IMAP, please?
