I have a customer with a weird issue with Gateway beacons. It looks like Citrix has killed ping.citrix.com website recently. This make is no longer suitable as a beacon as it does not respond. Is anyone else seeing strange issues with External users getting the wrong (VDA) address in the ICA file. The strange thing is that the issue manifests only in the workspace app and not the storefront site.

Beacons only get used if you are using workspace app directly

Interesting. We were looking for a recent change and though that ping might have been it.

have you run the beacon checker test tool from the CWA ?

Yep. It call out ping.citrix.com and does not complain otherwise.

As rob mentioned ping.citrix.com has been unavailable for ages i havent used it for years my external beacon is always my externally facing NS GW URL. The only time you have to get cute with internal /external beacons if your using a single FQDN for the Storefront base URL/NS GW URL eg citrix.corp.com externally and internally