Where does the Citrix Linux VDA store settings?

I recently (well today really) started playing with the Citrix Linux VDA. I took Ubuntu to test because I happen to like Ubuntu.

I didn’t get it to work correctly right away though and during troubleshooting I wanted to know where the VDA is storing it’s settings.

I found the following file /etc/xdl/ctx-vda.conf with the following contents:

# The file name of VDA log file
LogFile="/var/log/xdl/vda.log"
PerfLogFile="/var/log/xdl/vdaperf.log"

# The Java preference backend class
ConfigBackend="com.citrix.cds.common.DbPreferenceFactory"

# If ConfigBackend is database, this is the DB URL; otherwise this value is ignored
ConfigDbUrl="jdbc:postgresql://localhost/citrix-confdb"

# If ConfigBackend is database, this is the DB user name; otherwise this value is ignored
ConfigDbUser="ctxvda"

# If ConfigBackend is database, this is the DB password; otherwise this value is ignored
ConfigDbPasswd="Sw3jM-v7yxQBfklIrzKyrdTGcxO6PLU_"

# Use alternative Log4J configuration, verify Log4J configuration file exists and uncomment the line below
#Log4jConfig="/etc/xdl/log4j.xml"

# Set this flag to 1 to enter debugging mode
DebugMode=0

I didn’t check but I am assuming that the password is random and unique per VDA…

This clearly indicates that the settings are stored in a postgres database so let’s have a little look:

No access with the psql command so let’s check the postgres configuration:

The user with access to all databases is postgres (the default user) so we can become this user with su - postgres and query the list of databases with \l+ and list the schema’s with \dn+.

The actual data is in the schema reg so I also set the search path:

Let’s see what tables are in the database:

And finally let’s see what’s inside the tables with TABLE reg."Key":

Wow that’s registry keys, at least we now understand why the schema is named reg!

Table Properties doesn’t really contain anything interesting:

Table Value holds the interesting data:

So for instance ListOfDDCs is stored in Values:

And here an example to change the DDCs:

Note: making changes is likely unsupported by Citrix.