In today’s article, I’d like to share an issue that I’ve faced recently in our Citrix environment.

Issue:

Users enter their credentials at NetScaler gateway portal and click LogIn. It doesn’t go to the next page where users see applications and desktops. It spins on the same page for more than 3 minutes, and then users see their applications and desktops. When clicked, applications and desktops work normally without any delay.

Troubleshooting:

• Both NetScaler and Active Directory server’s CPU and memory usage are minimal.
• No errors were logged in Storefront, DDC, Active Directory servers event logs. But memory usage in DDC was very high. Rebooted DDC but that did not resolve the issue.
• NetScaler gateway vip has LDAP and RADIUS server configured. Connected to NetScaler via putty and executed cat /tmp/aaad.debug command. When a user logged in, it showed that “No response was received from RADIUS server” (“No valid RADIUS responses received” something like that) in the aaad.debug log. In the next step, it started LDAP queries. From there, all LDAP queries were successful.

Solution:

Based on the above message in aaad.debug log, verified RADIUS server status. The server was up and running, CPU and Memory usage was minimal. But a service, “MultiFactor Auth” was not started in the RADIUS server. When it is started, users were able to log in to the NetScaler gateway portal immediately.