MSTerminalServices.org Monthly Newsletter of June 2007 Sponsored by: SecureIDA

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:

1. What's up?

Hello there,

MSTerminalServices.org has added a killer functionality to the website. Now you can easily browse through the history of all major newsgroup postings on terminal services, formerly only reachable by a newsgroup reader. In here you will find and can contribute to numerous problems and information sharing on terminal services.

You will see that it is actively monitored by contributors who can give you instant advice on what to do. Microsoft themselves monitor these newsgroups, and if the regular contributors cannot answer the question there is a good chance that one of the MS techies will. Make sure to check out the forums over here.

Today Briforum Europe 2007 has been opened up for contributions. If you feel like coming to Amsterdam to do a presentation, make sure to visit the Briforum website. I hope to see you there.

So much for now!

Catch you later!

2. KB Articles of the Month

Here are some interesting and useful Terminal Services related articles posted by Microsoft in the last month:

• The logon operation fails when you use Terminal Services to log on to a DCOM server from a Windows-based server
  
• Generic programs are not viewable from a Terminal Server client on a clustered server
  


Hotfixes of the month

• Error message when you log off a Terminal Services session on Windows Server 2003 Terminal Server with Service Pack 1 or with Service Pack 2: "Stop 0x000000AB"
  
• Stop error message when a client computer logs off from a Terminal Services session on a server that is running Windows Server 2003 with SP1 or with SP2: "Stop 0x000000AB (SESSION_HAS_VALID_POOL_ON_EXIT)"
  
• The Csrss.exe process in a terminal-server session continuously consumes more than 50 percent of CPU resources on a Windows Server 2003-based terminal server
  

3. Ask our MVPs a question

QUESTION: I have a running 2003 TS server with a WAN and a LAN link. The LAN users run fine, but the WAN users are, out of the blue, suffering from disconnects and when they try to reconnect they get a "Request Timed Out" error. What could be the case here? Regards, Harsh

ANSWER: Dear Harsh,

The traffic for a TS session can flow through many types of hardware between client and server. Since you are having it across all your WAN users, the most obvious place to start looking is the hardware on your side - what you have in between the Internet or WAN and your actual TS server. Who maintains it, and have they run updates or changed the settings? Has an additional service been added to the network, requiring for example a change of the default MTU size on the router? Also check out every piece of hardware that has an idle time setting, and make sure it's set to a maximum. Open a call with your Internet provider to check if any changes have been made to the network. You can certainly rule out an issue with your server as the LAN users run fine.

I'm afraid you have a long way to troubleshoot but I am 100% sure that you need the help of the network guys to find the issue.

Good luck with this one!

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:

• Using Group Policies and Scripting to Ensure a Consistent User Experience
  Date - June 12, 2007; Author - René Vester; Section - Articles :: General
  In this article René explains the use of policies and scripting to gain a user environment which is the same for all users, but locked down exactly as you want it. There are loads of easy to follow examples on how to set this up.
• To Virtualize or Not To Virtualize with SBC
  Date - June 14, 2007; Author - Wilco van Bragt; Section - Articles :: Virtualization
  In this article Wilco, gives us a brief overview of the available virtualization technology. With virtualization being hyped today, it is a refreshing look at the concept.

5. The Toolbox Special

Ever wondered where that specific tool came from? Have you wondered if there are more out there, but Google is giving a bit much on a search? Despair no more, this month we have a special on all the well known, the lesser known and even the plain unknown resources for Terminal Server and Citrix tools out there. And guess what; they are all free!

http://www.ctrl-alt-del.com.au/CAD_TSUtils.htm
List of some awesome MUST HAVE tools for the TS administrator. The list of tools they have created is too big, but if you're in to monitoring your clients a bit better, make sure to check out this website

http://www.thinhelp.com/thin
Jim Kenzig has been around the block for a few years, and is now running thinhelp including an interesting download section for some killer tools

http://www.frameworkx.com
Gus Pinto runs this website. Click on free tools and check out the Citrix tools. This guy has created some tools that would make Citrix development turn blue in the face

http://www.wtstek.com/item2/tools.htm#Tools
Bernard Tritsch is running this one, and he only has one tool available, but it's a killer one if you're into setting the registry correct in a single action

http://www.thomaskoetzing.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=119&Itemid=193
Thomas Koetzing's website. He is famous for his 30MB resource kit which includes just about everything a TS admin could ever wish for. A must have download in your collection

Douglas Brown runs this show. He has been around from day 1 and has built up such a large collection of tools I don't even know where to begin. Al I can do is advise you to check out the list he has built up over the years

http://www.envokeit.com/Tools.aspx
Envoke IT is a consulting firm that has built some tools over the years for their customers and own people to use. They have been so friendly to share them with us also

http://www.loginconsultants.com/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=20&Itemid=125
Login Consultants is small Dutch firm, but with a well known reputation these days - creating tools for their customers, but not afraid to share them with the community. Some of these tools are being used by enterprise firms around the world.

http://www.sessioncomputing.com/downloads.htm
Patrick Rouse has been collecting tools for as long as I can remember. Make sure to check out this list also and to stock up for your next visit at a customer or to get ready for the next functionality request that comes from your manager. It may not be in the software itself, but good chance that you will find it on Patrick's website.

If you put all the tools together, the list is huge and probably way bigger then you would ever need. Hopefully on one of these sites you will find that little gem that you have been looking for, but were never able to find.

Don't want to download all that stuff? Just save this list for the next occasion.

6. Rumors on the SBC Space

What's new this month? A bunch of guys from joejoe.org released an alpha version of how they think Vista should look and work and called it "Longhorn reloaded". They used an early pre-release of Vista, from 2004 which included all the code including for example winfs support. After releasing the build on FTP and p2p Microsoft summoned them to stop making this available and they did.

Let's see what comes next from the community at large ;-)

Want to be able to log the usage of your terminal server(s) to a database format? Also want it to be free of charge? At you service! Here's an article from Luke Niland describing how to set this up. Read the full article here.

If you are into securing your terminal server, Roddy Rodstein a Senior Enterprise Systems Engineer working for Citrix has released a book on Citrix and Terminal Server security. A 260 page book about everything you need to know about securing your TS environment. Details about the book can be found .

Michel Roth has written a good article on the upcoming Windows Server 2008 "Session Broker Load Balancing". Make sure to check it out here.

See you next month!