Here’s a quick post in order to describe an issue I ran into after upgrading to MacOS Sequoia on an M1 Studio. After upgrade was complete I was prompted to enable the firewall (previously I used an additional product). Everything seemed fine and I was able to get on with using my system normally. I currently am running Sequoia 15.0.1 (24A348).
Around the same time I also upgraded to Citrix Workspace App 2409, especially because it introduced support for MacOS Sequoia https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-workspace-app-for-mac/whats-new#support-for-macos-15-sequoia.
At some point later that day I started to experience disconnection from Citrix sessions upon the 30 and 60 minute session lifetime, which incorrectly sent me down the route of checking timeout settings firstly and then other suspicious network observations which turned out to be unrelated.
What follows to my regret was starting a lengthy sequence of troubleshooting steps including Wireshark, building Azure VMs in different geo-locations, downgrade of Citrix ADC VPX Gateway, testing on Windows VM in my Mac, throwing the kitchen sink at it in fact.
Only when I began investigating further – by building a Windows 11 VM in the geographical location (in order to eliminate inter-country internet links) – did I find that the Citrix session within the desktop was rock solid. Instead, the problem shifted to my MacOS based RDP connection to the said temporary desktop, along with error 0x407 “Your session ended because of a data encryption error”.
At which point I realised that the session resets occurring periodically under ICA were also a symptom of the underlying session terminating, in a similar way to the RDP protocol.
Searching more widely I came across a few articles, linked below (with thanks) and discovered that disabling the Mac firewall then immediately resolved the problem with both RDP and ICA connections. I upgraded the MS Remote Desktop app with the new version (now called Windows App) and retested my session stability. I checked my Citrix Workspace App for Mac was updated fully and everything is now working fine, but only with the firewall switched off and a third-party app doing its job instead.
In summary – there appears to be a problem currently with the firewall implementation in Sequoia, and I look forward to seeing this patched soon.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255799644
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1fizxc9/ms_rdp_broken_on_macos_sequoia/
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/23/security_in_brief
Specialising in virtualisation technology and application delivery
