05.06.2018 Update

That was (relatively) quick! Today, Citrix released Citrix Receiver 4.12 which seems to include a permanent fix.

 

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Citrix finally brought us an auto-update feature in Citrix Receiver 4.8 only to break it immediately after release. According to Citrix, the “Citrix Receiver Updater service stopped working due to a certificate issue at the Receiver Updater Service infrastructure.”

Citrix Knowledge Center provides an extensive Citrix Receiver Updates Troubleshooting Guide which describes all kinds of problems with the auto-update feature and how to fix them. It seems that the auto-update feature can break if there is no disk space to install the update, if there are network problems or if the firewall blocks the communication to the update server. But Citrix fails to mention that the feature can also break (and did break for everybody), if there is a problem within an old version of Citrix Receiver itself.

This article provides some guidance on how to fix the broken auto-update feature.

Update to 4.11?

Of course not. The latest version of Citrix Receiver still has not fixed the issue. So if you choose to update to version 4.11 you will still need to apply the fix. See below.

Fix Citrix Receiver manually

Citrix provides a fix for their issue, which can be found in their Knowledge Center. You can download the ReceiverUpdaterCertWindows.exe file and install it on affected PCs.

Package the fix

If you want to deploy the fix using Microsofts Configuration Manager or any other software deployment solution, you need to package the ReceiverUpdaterCertWindows.exe. The command line which needs to be executed to apply the fix is as follows:

ReceiverUpdaterCertWindows.exe silent

For some reason, switches like /s, /silent or /q do not work.

What does the fix do?

The fix provided by Citrix extracts the following to files and places them in the install directory of Citrix Receiver:

• msr.xml
• msr.xml.sig

After the patch has been applied, these files are located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\ICA Client\Receiver. Depending on how your software distribution tools works, you can also just deploy these two files.

Not a permanent fix

The two files which fix the Citrix Receiver are placed inside the Receiver folder in the following directory: C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\ICA Client\. Unfortunately, this directory is deleted whenever Citrix Receiver is updated. This means that if you apply the fix for version 4.9, it will auto-update to either the next Current Release or LTSR and then stop working again.

We will have to wait until Citrix Receiver 4.12 is published to see if that version contains a final fix for the auto-update problem.