Pre-Authentication Check Failed

This is a really dumb sequence of error messages generated by the Citrix Access Gateway Secure Access Client.  If you happen to make a typo when entering the web address of the Access Gateway you will likely receive a security alert such as the following warning that the identity of the Citrix Access Gateway you are attempting to connect to cannot be verified.

This warning often appears even when there are no issues with the Access Gateway you are connecting to, rather there may be a proxy server on the network from which you are connecting or some other network device or access rule is blocking the verification -- so you might not think anything of it.  If you click "Yes" to continue, you'll likely receive a more serious warning indicating that your client has failed a pre-authentication check.

Before you start reconfiguring the access policies on your gateway or checking for new hot fixes or updates to apply, you may want to double-check the web address you entered for any typos.  The Citrix Access Gateway client does not actually verify that you entered a legitimate web address, it just goes ahead and tries to use it.  In this case, a simple typo in the web address meant that the host name could not be resolved resulting in the two warnings shown above.

Citrix Access Gateway Plug-In and VMware Workstation Compatibility

Here's an interesting problem I ran into recently.  I have a Windows XP virtual machine running in VMware Workstation 7 on a Windows 7 client.  I recently installed the Citrix Access Gateway Plug-in for Windows version 4.6.2  on my Windows 7 client so that I could remotely connect to some of my clients' networks.  I noticed that anytime I launched the Access Gateway Plug-in on my Windows 7 host, I could no longer browse the web or resolve host names from my Windows XP guest.  This really sucked as I was hoping that I would be able to access hosts on client networks from my Windows XP guest as there are still a lot of management tools which are not compatible with Windows 7, Cisco's Fabric Manager for example.  I eventually stumbled upon an interesting fix.  In order to allow the Windows XP guest to share the SSL VPN connection to a client's network on the host, you have to configure the network adapter on the virtual machine to use NAT rather an a bridged connection.

Of course, another solution would have been to install the Citrix Access Gateway client within the Windows guest VM and leave the network connection set to "bridged."  This would allow you to establish a VPN connection directly from your guest VM without also connecting the host.  This is great for testing and troubleshooting external access as the host (or other guest VMs) would remain outside the client's network.  However, once you load the Citrix Access Gateway client on the host, guest VMs configured to use a bridged connection appear to lose all network connectivity.  I haven't been able to figure a solution for that scenario.