MSTerminalServices.org - March 2008 Newsletter

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MSTerminalServices.org Monthly Newsletter of March 2008 Sponsored by: Automation Control Products Welcome to the MSTerminalServices.org newsletter by Stefan Vermeulen, MVP and Citrix CTP. Each month we will bring you interesting and helpful information on MS Terminal Services and server based computing. We want to know what all *you* are interested in hearing about. Please send your suggestions for future newsletter content to: SVermeulen@MSTerminalServices.org Secure your Thin Clients and applications with TermSecure TermSecure logs you in and reconnects you to your existing terminal server sessions. Your programs follow you and appear on screen, ready to use as you approach. Walk away and your applications disappear. TermSecure adds a layer of security with an RFID proximity card, a USB flash key or manual login. Combine authentication methods and greatly increase security.  Limit users or terminals to a specific schedule or disable them completely at any time you choose. Maximum security with TermSecure! 1. Community drain; gain or pain? The Terminal Services community has been there from day 1 and it is a pretty tight one. The Terminal Services development team is one of the smallest ones in the Microsoft group. And to be honest, so is its community. It started with thethin mailing list (still alive today) and a few folks over at Citrix giving out best practices on a pdf. Rick Delingher wrote that, and that pdf was the trigger for me to get into this community. More and more first generation community websites started popping up, like dabcc.com, thethin.com, brianmadden.com, and a few I probably forgot to mention. Server based computing started to become an accepted technology, and was no longer that weird stuff to deploy applications. It became an acceptable way to close the gap between web based applications and those tools that were not ready yet but needed to be deployed anyway. After the year 2000 more community websites popped up to inform people on the best practices, etc. You could meet these community people during conferences they attended and the sessions they gave. Besides vendor based conferences, other types appeared like briforum in the US, and pubforum in Europe. So what is with the little history lesson? Well, this year a lot of these names were scooped up to join Terminal Server based companies. To give you the list so far: In the beginning of this year we had, joining Provision Neworks. (now Quest) Jeff Pitsch http://www.jeffpitschconsulting.com Patrick Rouse http://www.sessioncomputing.com Later Provision added another 2 to the list: Rick Mack Michel Roth http://www.thincomputing.net And this month, 2 people went over to Citrix Gus Pinto http://www.frameworkx.com Rich Crusco http://www.frameworkx.com The most interesting part are those guys joining Provision Networks. These are all people really into Citrix technology, and they are taking this step. Rick Mack's explanation to the community has been published on Brian's site. You can read it here. As you click on the website links, you can see that Jeff's website is already cleaned out. The others will no doubt start changing focus to their new eco system. Hence the title of this article. Will the community benefit from these changes in any way, like having the websites up with the same info as usual, and will we see these guys as evangelists at the SBC conferences? Or can we write off their sites as biased and see them flying the colors of their new companies, only telling their version to save the world? Do not get me wrong, the community is much larger than these guys, but it does worry me in a way. Especially Rick's statement and to go for the underdog like Provision which has a position in the market like Citrix had in the beginning. Has the biggest player out there disappointed their most loyal evangelists? If so, then what about the customers? Are they stuck with a vendor they might not be so happy with? Will we also see a shift in market space, and finally get some real competition in SBC technology? Secure your Thin Clients and applications with TermSecure TermSecure logs you in and reconnects you to your existing terminal server sessions. Your programs follow you and appear on screen, ready to use as you approach. Walk away and your applications disappear. TermSecure adds a layer of security with an RFID proximity card, a USB flash key or manual login. Combine authentication methods and greatly increase security.  Limit users or terminals to a specific schedule or disable them completely at any time you choose. Maximum security with TermSecure! 2. KB Articles / Webcasts of the Month Information about new Group Policy preferences in Windows Server 2008 Network shares become unresponsive on a Windows Server 2003-based computer after some time, and you receive an error message Stop error message when multiple console applications are opened and closed within a short time frame on a Windows Server 2003-based computer: "0x000000F4" After you apply a GPO to redirect a folder to a network share on Windows XP-based or on Windows Server 2003-based client computers, the redirected folder is empty Roaming profiles do not work after migration from Windows 2000 to Windows Server 2003 When you start a 32-bit application in a 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003, a delay occurs You cannot use the Reg.exe utility to access 64-bit registry keys on a 64-bit computer from a computer that is running a 32-bit version of Windows Server 2003 The "Font smoothing" feature has no effect in Windows Server 2003 terminal sessions Error message when you run the Icacls.exe utility to set ownership of a file or of a folder on a computer that is running Windows Server 2003 SP2: "Access is denied" The Icacls.exe utility cannot display non-English languages on Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2-based computers 3. Ask our MVPs a question This is simple and straight forward: shoot us your TS/Citrix question and we will get some of the top Terminal Services MVPs together and get you an answer, from everyone's point of view! The best question of the month will be published here with all the answers from these guys. Just email us at SVermeulen@MSTerminalServices.org. QUESTION: Stefan; when I run a full desktop session in Citrix, then that is exactly what I get. Now I would like to see the same in a Terminal Server session, thus without this yellow bar in the middle of the top screen. Is there any way to get rid if it? Regards, Theo, ANSWER: You are in luck. This little banner is actually controlled by a registry key. You can have it removed on the client machine via the following value: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client "PinConnectionBar" = REG_DWORD:0 I did not come up with this one myself. You can read all about it in this following Microsoft article here. 4. Learning Zone We have a great group of articles in the Learning Zone that will help you get a handle on your most difficult configuration issues. Here are just a few of the newer and more interesting articles: Writing Terminal Service Based Scripts Date - Mar 5, 2008; Author - Brien M Posey; Section - Articles & Tutorials :: Scripting In this article Brien finishes up the types of commands to use in Terminal Server Scripting. In the next articles in these series, Brien will go into the scripting languages. How to install and configure Provision Networks Virtual Access Suite (VAS) Enterprise Edition (Part 3) Date - Feb 20, 2008; Author - Patrick Rouse; Section - Articles & Tutorials :: General Patrick describes how to install, configure and administer the Desktop Services features of the Provision Networks Vas solution. Secure your Thin Clients and applications with TermSecure TermSecure logs you in and reconnects you to your existing terminal server sessions. Your programs follow you and appear on screen, ready to use as you approach. Walk away and your applications disappear. TermSecure adds a layer of security with an RFID proximity card, a USB flash key or manual login. Combine authentication methods and greatly increase security.  Limit users or terminals to a specific schedule or disable them completely at any time you choose. Maximum security with TermSecure! 5. Tip of the Month This month a great freeware tool has been released from Sepago. It is called SepagoClassRoom and it lets you define training classrooms dynamically and across spatial boundaries (i.e., even across different sites). sepagoCLASSROOM achieves this through the consequent use of the shadowing functions of the terminal server, giving the lecturer full control over the classroom situation. It can be used to administer several training classrooms. Various participant seats can be assigned to each classroom. In turn, a certain participant can be assigned to each participant seat. If this is something that may match your training needs, make sure to check it out and download it here. 6. Blog Posts Tad talks about what's new with TS in Win2008. Tad explains the TS Gateway and RemoteApp publishing. Sriram whiteboards the multi-user kernel. Niraj expands on TS Gateway, and Kevin talks about TS Web Access and publishing. Another interesting article on the new Terminal Services is how the IT department from Microsoft itself deploys it. Read all about it. Integrating Vista and Terminal Services 2008 authentication? Combining Windows 2008 Terminal Server with a Vista Client enables using the Credential Security Service Provider (CredSSP) to optimize the logon procedure to a Terminal Server. With CredSSP it is not necessary to create a temporary session to determine a user session is already available. Want to catch up on best practices on using GPOs for deploying Terminal Services? Read the article from Gabe Knuth on Brian's site. Citrix released a beta of their VDI xendesktop solution. Want to dive in early and give it a spin? Microsoft has updated it's "Infrastructure Planning and Design" for Terminal Services. I would consider this mandatory reading for those of you who are serious about deploying large setups. Thomas did some snooping inside the content of Delaware (Citrix's next version of Presentation Server) and discovered that there were features there for supporting the Secure Gateway. This means that you can still use the good old (free) CSG on a Windows Server 2008. An interesting article that goes deep under the hood of Citrix's Speedscreen technology. If you are as curious as me read here! You can now make your Terminal Server 2008 MultiLanguage aware for free. Microsoft has released the MUI for server 2008. Another in depth article on Microsoft's new Hyper-V technology. I think it is a good thing that we are seeing more of these to get a good impression, without setting up a test farm ourselves. Want to test yourself after reading the above article? You are in luck. Microsoft has released the RC0 and you are free to play with it. Citrix introduced Session Reliability some time ago. The impact it had on port usage has not been discussed in detail. 7. Events / Links of the Month So much for March. A month with most of its news in the Community, and not so much in the Industry (compared to last month). No company takeovers for a change, although I doubt that it will remain like this for the rest of the year. We have a lot of fights coming up over the VDI space and Citrix needs to deal with the marketing rumors about ICA being obsolete over RDP. Will they hold their ground, and will we all be talking RDP in a year or two? I think we will get some answers during the rest of this year. See you next month! Secure your Thin Clients and applications with TermSecure TermSecure logs you in and reconnects you to your existing terminal server sessions. Your programs follow you and appear on screen, ready to use as you approach. Walk away and your applications disappear. TermSecure adds a layer of security with an RFID proximity card, a USB flash key or manual login. Combine authentication methods and greatly increase security.  Limit users or terminals to a specific schedule or disable them completely at any time you choose. Maximum security with TermSecure! TechGenix Sites ISAserver.org The No.1 ISA Server 2006 / 2004 / 2000 resource site. MSExchange.org The leading Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 / 2003 / 2000 resource site. WindowSecurity.com Network Security & Information Security resource for IT administrators. WindowsNetworking.com Windows Server 2008 / 2003 & Vista networking resource site.

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