Terminal Services doesn't give you much control over the installation process. If you try to run an application's setup.exe routine, a nastygram tells you that you must use Add/Remove Programs and offers you a link to the applet. If you use Add/Remove Programs, Win2K installs the application in multiuser mode.
The Terminal Services Licensing utility is for keeping tabs on terminal sessions only. I explained how this tool works and how to set it up in "Windows 2000 vs. NT Terminal Server Licensing," February 2000. In brief, you need to run an activated license manager to let people access the terminal server. The licensing tool doesn't need to run on the terminal server itself; you can install it on any Win2K Server system.
Under Your Thumb
Thus far, you've learned how to use Terminal Services tools to create clients, configure connection and user settings, install applications, and license users. Your users are happily typing away in their terminal sessions. But what if something goes wrong? Win2K Server includes Terminal Services Manager (which Figure 4 shows) to help you track who is using the terminal server, what processes they're running, and their connection status.
The left pane shows all the domains in the network and all terminal servers within those domains. (You can use this tool to manage any listed terminal server; you don't need to be physically at the server's console.) The contents of the right pane depend on what you select in the left pane. If you select the entire network or the domain, the right pane displays all current connections to terminal servers (active or disconnected), along with the name of the server hosting each connection. If you select a terminal server, the right pane displays all current connections to that server. If you select a username, the right pane shows all the processes running in that user's context or information about the user session. Notice also that the right pane is tabbed, and the contents of the tabs depend on whether you've selected a domain, server, or user on the left.
A short period of poking around will teach you where to find the information you need. Table 2, page 66 , should also help—it lists some of the information available on the different tabs. More important is discovering what you can do with Terminal Services Manager. Let's look at an example of how to use the management tools to see what is running on the server, send messages to users on the server, terminate remote processes, and close user sessions.
Suppose you want to find out whether anyone is playing TSQuake (a bogus Terminal Services-compliant version of the popular game Quake). From Terminal Services Manager, select the terminal server or domain that you want information about. The right pane displays a tab listing users currently logged on to the terminal server, a tab showing the current active and disconnected sessions, and a tab showing the processes currently running on the terminal server. Everything you need to discover which user and which process identifier (PID) are associated with which session, and how busy that session is, is here.
Click the Processes tab associated with the domain to see a complete list of all processes running in the domain, the server they're running on, the session they're in, and the name of the user who owns that session. This tab also shows the PID, which comes in handy when you need to terminate processes from the command prompt. The only way to identify a specific application instance is by its PID.
After you have your list of people running TSQuake, you can let them know they're caught. You can send a message to one or more individuals, even across domains, from the Terminal Services Manager interface or from the command line. To send a message from Terminal Services Manager, select the terminal server. Then select the people to whom you want to send a message. From the Actions menu, choose Send Message to open the message dialog box. Compose your message, click OK, and the message will instantly pop up on the screen of the individuals you selected.
The Terminator
Gertrude and the other TSQuake players ignore your message. Time to get tough and terminate the application. Every instance of TSQuake that you close will exit immediately, with no warning to the user and no chance to save data.
To terminate one instance of an application from Terminal Services Manager, select the server or domain in the left pane and click the Processes tab in the right pane. All running processes will appear. Select the process you want to terminate, right-click Terminate on the Action menu, and choose End Process (the only option). The selected application instance will end immediately.
Instead of just shutting down an application from the terminal server, you might want to take control of a user session to see exactly what the user is doing. For example, if Gertrude says she didn't mean to run TSQuake but couldn't figure out how to shut it down after she started it, you could take control of her session to troubleshoot the problem. You can perform any action from your remote location that Gertrude can perform locally in the session.
You can take remote control of a terminal server session only from another terminal server session that is using the same display protocol—you can't control ICA sessions from RDP or vice versa. In addition, the remote control option in Terminal Services Manager and the shadow command-line utility won't work from the console. Therefore, to control another session, you must start a terminal server session and log on with administrative privileges. From within the session, start Terminal Services Manager. Select a terminal server in the left pane, then click the Users tab so that user sessions are showing. Find the session you want to shadow, then choose Remote Control from the Actions menu. A dialog box will prompt you for the hot-key combination to use to end remote control of Gertrude's session (so that you can get back to your session).
If you've configured Gertrude's session to require user permission for remote control, a dialog box will appear on the screen, letting Gertrude know that someone has requested permission to control her session. If she permits the control, you're in charge of her session and you can close the application. If she doesn't permit the control, you'll see an error message telling you that you don't have permission to control the session.
If you want to stop an entire terminal session, not just one process within it, you can disconnect or reset the connection. Disconnecting cuts the user off from the session but leaves all applications running and data in memory. Users can reconnect to the session they were disconnected from and be right back where they left off. A reset connection, in contrast, closes all open applications. Disconnected sessions still use some system resources, but not many because Win2K Server eventually pages their unreferenced data to disk and the sessions don't have new user input to process. Reset sessions use no resources.
To disconnect or reset a session from Terminal Services Manager, select the session in the left pane and choose Disconnect or Reset from the Action menu. A message box warns you that the session will be disconnected or reset. Click OK to end the selected session.
This article isn't an exhaustive tutorial about isn't Terminal Services. But if you're just beginning to think about setting up Win2K for server-based computing, it's a good look at the tools that are at your disposal.
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