World of EUC

if someone is in the mood.. can someone explain to me how Beacons work with onprem citrix environments? Should the internal beacon be kept as "Use the service URL" and external beacon empty?

beacons are only used if you are using a store via CWA to access your apps/desktops not RFW via web browser. It detects if you are internal or extenal by checking your beacons. Your internal beacon must be a URL not resolvable on public INET eg storefront.c4rm0.local

Beacons are used if you are setting up your Storefront to be hit both inside and outside through a Netscaler.  If they can hit the internal beacon workspace app uses the storefront config.  If they can't, then they use the NetScaler URL.  This is why your storefront and Netscaler url should always be 2 different addresses.

But what if I don't configure any beacons at all? why do I even need them. If I have a GW configured, I can just deploy a GPO for workspace app right?

I found this <https://www.reddit.com/r/Citrix/comments/a7mahd/can_someone_help_understanding_beacon_points_in/> - So basically.. if I understand this correctly beacons are used to determine if the client is on the internal or external network. If the client is on the internal network, then the traffic will go directly to SF and if the client is on the external network, the traffic will go through the external GW. So beacons are a way to determine where the client is located. Which means.. if there are no beacons then there is no way to determine where the traffic should go, so then I guess the traffic will go through receiver for web (external GW) all the time. Very confusing.. how difficult can it be? :smile:

CWA pulls the beacon regardless if you have them there or not, so I would just recommend putting in an internal only url and the external gateway url as the external.  Then if you have a laptop setup for the internal, and it goes external it automatically routes to the gateway.