Introducing Terminal Services Tools

You've given in to the hype and intend to try out Windows 2000 Server Terminal Services, just to find out what all the fuss is about. From the Control Panel Add/Remove Applications applet, you've opened Add/Remove Programs, chosen Windows Setup to install a service, and scrolled down the list of available services to find Terminal Services. Install the service in Application Server mode, reboot, and you're ready to go. Right?

Not quite. Making terminal services work isn't just about installing a service. It's also about installing client-side support, viewing connection information, adding applications, tuning user and connection settings to define the level of control that an administrator has over sessions, and sometimes manipulating those sessions. Terminal Services provides tools for accomplishing all these tasks. Some, if not all, of the tools will be familiar to users of Citrix MetaFrame or WinFrame or Windows NT Server 4.0, Terminal Server Edition (WTS). But if you're trying out terminal services for the first time with Win2K, you might welcome an introduction to the contents of the toolbox. Table 1, page 62, lists Terminal Services' tools, which, unless otherwise stated, are in the Administrative Tools folder.

Prepare to Meet Your Creator
Terminal services won't do you much good until you connect clients to them. Most modern Windows terminals have an installed RDP, but PCs are an exception, and they're the most commonly used terminal-session client. You can use Terminal Services' Client Creator tool to create installation disks for a client, but I don't recommend doing so.

Instead, consider sharing the client installation files. Win2K Server's \%systemroot%\system32\clients\tsclient\net folder contains a Win32 folder for 32-bit Windows (on Intel) clients such as NT Workstation and Windows 9x and a Win16 folder for 16-bit clients such as Windows 3.x. Share the entire contents of the net folder if you have both 16-bit and 32-bit

Windows clients on your network or only the appropriate subfolder if only one OS is on your network. The files aren't well organized, but if you tunnel to \%installation folder%\disks\disk1, you'll find a setup.exe program. Run it, and answer the questions to install the RDP client. Alternatively, you can email the contents of the appropriate folder to users and instruct them to run setup.exe.

Go Configure
After you install the client-side RDP software, the client is prepared to connect to Terminal Services, but you might want to do some more work before you let that happen. You can control on a per-connection and per-user basis how long a session can last, how long a session can remain idle before the system disconnects it, how long a session can remain disconnected before the system terminates it, and how someone can take remote control of a user session. You can edit client path and profile information on a per-user basis.

Let's start with the per-connection settings. In Terminal Services Configuration, click Connections to see a list of the connections the terminal server supports. We know that Figure 1 shows a server that supports only Terminal Services because only RDP-Tcp appears in the right pane. If you installed MetaFrame or Direct ICA on the terminal server, those listings would also appear. Right-click RDP-Tcp to open the connection's properties dialog box. You can use this box to edit any connection settings and specify whether the connection settings will override user settings.

The Terminal Services Configuration window also shows a Server Settings folder. Click it to see the window in Figure 2. The right pane lists settings that apply to all terminal server sessions, not just RDP sessions. These settings are only partially useful. For example, you can't switch between Remote Administration mode and Application Server mode without reinstalling Terminal Services. If you try to change this setting from the Server Settings interface, Win2K Server opens the Windows Setup window so that you can repeat the entire Terminal Services setup process. Also, don't bother installing Internet Connector licensing; only anonymous Internet users can connect to the terminal server using that license type. Generally, the default settings (a combination of settings you chose when you installed the service and ones defined for terminal services in general) work pretty well, except that I would turn off Active Desktop unless you absolutely need it—it's a resource hog.

User Preferences
If you want to use different profiles or home directories for terminal server sessions than you do for ordinary network connections, you can define these properties in a user's Properties dialog box, which Figure 3, page 64, shows. If you've set up terminal user accounts on a member server, you can access user account properties from the Local Users and Groups section of the Computer Management tool in the Administrative Tools folder. If user accounts are on a domain controller, you can access user account properties from the Active Directory Users and Computers tool in the Administrative Tools folder. The two dialog boxes look pretty much alike for the purposes of terminal-session settings; they're just in different places. The remote control, encryption, and other connection-related settings work the same way on a per-user basis as they do on a per-connection basis.

By default, any settings you configure on a per-user basis override those defined for the connection type. You use the connection configuration tool described previously to make an RDP connection setting override a user setting, but you must do this on a per-setting basis. No "override all user-specific settings" check box exists.

Administering some connection settings, such as profile information and home directory location, on a per-user basis makes sense. Unfortunately, even though you could manage some settings better on a group basis, Win2K provides no way to do this.

Giving and Taking Away Programs
Presumably, you'll want to run applications on your terminal server. Win2K has two tools for installing programs: the Control Panel Add/Remove Programs applet and the Change User text command. Both utilities put the terminal server in Install mode. The utilities copy some Registry settings to a key in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. The installation program copies the settings to HKEY_CURRENT_USER when a user runs the application while the server is in Execute mode. (You click Finish after you install an application or type

change user /execute

at the command line to put the server in Execute mode.)