A useful list of Terminal Server commands – some of which I knew, some I didn’t.
We’ve had two occurances of Terminal Services and Sql server not responding after the servers had been rebooted after the patches had been applied.
Terminal Services had the service running and using mstsc to the server would result in a message saying the server was not accepting connections. Telnetting to port 3389 would come back with a connection but nothing in the telnet prompt. A reboot of the server cured this problem.
As far as SQL server was concerned, the SQL service had not restarted after the reboot – not sure why as I didn’t have time to troubleshoot – I just needed to get the service running, which happened as soon as I launched Enterprise manager and attempted to connect to the server.
Anyone else had similar experiences?
Apparently it is possible to run quickbooks on terminal services but it involves several hacks including the raising of admin priviledges for users. To me the risk of admin rights and the unsupportedness (which is not that much different to support in my experience with quicken) of a companies financial data is just not worth the risk of trying it.
Using the script at the technet script center I was able to quickly go through and modify all the users properties for their terminal server profile. It is not possible to do this by bulk selecting the users, right clicking and choosing properties and then entering in \\server\dir\%username% like you would for the home directory.
Setting the default printer in a script might be handy – I have a user whose printer keeps getting set to the wrong one when they log into terminal services from one particular location. Hopefully this script will solve that problem.
PrintConductor looks like a useful tool for printing multiple docs automatically – like all the manuals for Live Communication Server which incidentally I went live with some real users this afternoon. It’s taken this long to get the software, user documentation written and the time to install it myself. Work has been incredibly busy with a couple of clients and this week seems to be no better even though we had a new guy start today.
This morning started off badly with all the remote sites complaining that they were getting a message saying that Windows Updates had finished installing and the computer needed restarting but the restart now, reboot later buttons were greyed out. I should have realised they were talking about the screen appearing in their terminal server window and they don’t have permission to reboot the server! Instead I spent a while poking around in their event viewer trying to find out what the problem was. I’m not sure if the problem is me not being clear enough when I ask if they are using terminal services or whether its just too complicated a question…. Maybe I’ll rename the TS icon on their main desktop to “IF YOU CLICK THIS YOU ARE USING TERMINAL SERVICES” and put a default background saying the same thing.
As I’ve had a number of requests on how to reset the compaq Evo T20 I thought I’d post the answer here to make it faster and easier for people.
Just hold the g key down as you turn on the unit and keep the key held down until the unit asks you to set it up.
If you use this information I would appreciate it if you drop me an email me just so I have a rough idea of how useful this is to people.
I wasn’t sure whether posting this information is too much of a vulnerability disclosure and technically I guess its getting around the encryption of a device and thereby violates the DCMA? However the information is/was freely available by ringing up compaq – once you’ve worked out what number to ring AND managed to get hold of someone who knows what you are talking about.
I signed up yesterday for a trial version of LapLink Everywhere which apparently gives you the ability to retrieve files, emails and even remotely control your remote pc when elsewhere such as behind a corporate firewall. Sounds good but….
the service is not free (after the first 15 days), emails should really mean “outlook or outlook express”, and the remote control only gives you 1 hour a month – unlimited use is an extra $5 a month. Seems a bit much seeing as though vnc, which they actually use to provide you with remote control facilities is free. The only advantage to Laplink Everywhere is that it will work through firewalls and the traffic is encypted due to the use of SSL. I was impressed with how I could view the contents of my hard disk from work though! I think this is a similar service to gotomypc but they tend to spam their ad’s everywhere so I won’t use them out of principle. Guess I’ll have to rely on using vnc and dyndns to do this – sometime in the near future.