TSL blog

Our client had a problem with one of servers in their farm. The backup job could not be run if someone was accessing certain files on the computer. If file was opened the backup would fail.

Although most modern backup programs are able to backup an open file, our customer is backuping-up a very old database format, and even a modern backup program cannot handle it.

This is the error we were receiving. Backup could not be performed due to inability to lock the database.

Performing Backup jobs on a Terminal Sever can be complicated. An automated script is going to log-off all users at midnight. Users cannot login 12:00AM – 3:00AM to prevent them accessing server and opening a databases that is being backuped.

To ensure everything works smoothly we used our product Terminal Services Log to analyze user activities on server and check if there are no active sessions (if a user was not included in the log off script).

By using Users and Sessions report we were able to locate what the users that were still active in backup time… For these ‘problematic users’ we change idle logoff timeout and included them in the midnight auto log off script.

After correct configuration backup is running normally :).

This post is not related with SBC computing. It is client based computing

I had a Dell XPS laptop for a while now. I am very satisfied with it. It very fast and reliable.

I have Windows Vista and Office 2003 installed, and everything worked fine but Excel. It was crashing all the time, and I had to run it in a virtual machine.

Excel was crashing with the following error:

Faulting application EXCEL.EXE, version 11.0.8237.0, time stamp 0×48eff43b, faulting module OLEAUT32.dll, version 6.0.6001.18000, time stamp 0×4791a74f, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0×00004580, process id 0×6b4, application start time 0×01c95f0ed33d2368.

I have been trying to solve the problem for a while. I finally figured-out that problem was caused by a Bluetooth Add-in that was auto starting with Excel.

If you have a similar problem this might solve it, it did for me:

Open registry and locate HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Excel\Addins\BtOfficeAddin.BtOfficeIntegration.1

Change the key LoadBehavior from 3 to 0.

Exit registry edit and try Excel. It helped me.

Dear readers, we are happy to announce the release of a new product edition - TSL Professional.
TSL Professional includes the following new features:
• Centralized Monitoring of a TS/Citrix Farm
A comprehensive management interface enables complete, single-point management of the entire Terminal services/Citrix farm including all servers from any location.
• Scheduled Reports Delivery to Email
Powerful, intuitive and easy to use it will save you from the manual job of manually running reports.
• Enhanced Scalability
The new edition now allows you to store your product data directly to Microsoft SQL Server (2005/2008) database. SQL will allow you better scalability, performance and easy and powerful backup options.
• New report: Total Time on system by user
Active + Idle = Total time on system. Useful for reporting on how many hours particular users were connected to your terminal server.
• New report: Number of users per day
It shows the total number of users that connected to your server during one day.

We would like to hear you opinions about our product! Any feedback would be much appreciated.

I’ve had a little problem few days ago with a client. The problem involved audio in Terminal services environment.

They wanted to redirect audio from Terminal server to client machine via RDP connection. This is not a big deal since Windows 2003 supports audio redirection over RDP.

Both computers need to have a sound card. No sound card = no sound. It may sound confusing but sound card on server is required because we are going to redirect the sound to the client over RDP connection.

Sound card on the server is needed because we will redirected sound from audio driver that is generated on the server over RDP connection to audio that is on the client. It is little hard to explain but sound must exist on the server to forward it to the client.

Default settings:

By default RDP audio is disabled on the server. Please check your options on Terminal services configuration in Administrative tools. Option for controlling RDP audio is under client settings (on the bottom). By default this option is checked which means audio over RDP is disabled.

Step by step server configuration:

1. Go to Terminal Services Configuration in Administration tools.
2. In Connections choose properties for RDP-TCP protocol
3. Go Client Settings tab, and under “Disable the following:” UNCHECK “Audio mapping” option.
4. Confirm everything.

Step by step client configuration:

In Remote desktop client go to the local resources tab and then make sure “Bring to this computer” is selected under remote computer sound.

Now open a connection to your Terminal server. You will be able to hear sound played on your server.

Often administrators have would like to to turn off or reboot a server remotely.

We have this problem every two weeks. Every two weeks we were testing our virtualized backup images of all terminal servers. (In future posts I will describe how we managed to backup multiple physical Terminal servers on one virtual using VMWare). Servers are collocated to another continent

When backup system is tested we need to turn off our terminal servers and boot virtual servers that are identical to the production servers. This is required because in order to avoid duplicate IP or NETBIOS name (virtual servers have the same network configuration as the production servers).

Before we bought ibootbar Appliance we had to call somebody to go to the company and turn on the production servers. This procedure is always tested over weekend so employees were not happy to come to work just to plugin the servers.

We decided to implement remote power control for servers and choose iBootBar appliance because it has support for TCP/IP protocol.

Picture shows a scheme of the implemented solution.

Solid lines are network connections and bold lines in the bottom are the power lines. Users are using server via regular network connection. ibootbar and backup server are also connected to same switch because users and administrators are entering network via one switch. Power is plugged into iBootBar and then from iBootBar into servers.

In production only terminal server is turned on. Backup terminal is off.  Users are connecting via network switch to terminal server.

Here is the backup procedure performed via iBootbar:

• Backup server is turned on via iBootBar
• While backup server is on we can connect to it via RDP (server has the same network name and network configuration as production server)
• When tests are over, we will turn off backup server from RDP and use iBootBar to turn on the production server.

iBoorBar console is accessible via web console and only thing you will need to allow is HTTPS traffic though firewall to iBoorBar.

Our iBoorbar has external IP so we are able to connect to it from anywhere without problem and control power on all of our servers.

For any extra information I would recommend iBootbar homepage at his webiste

Terminal services log is the first and only application that will provide exact information about users activity on Terminal Server/Citrix, showing for how long an user was connected on server, how much of that time he was idle (not working anything) or active (working something on server).

TSL 2.0 provides information about application usage. Data collected is displayed in forms of charts and grids that can be exported to PDF and Excel.

By using our product you can have detailed usage reports of all terminal servers in your organization. Here are some business problems you might be facing in your own company.

Example of all users summary report (summary for total time, active/idle/disconnected)

Users and sessions

Let’s say you want to see all the users that connected to your server in a particular time frame:

Our application comes with a built in report that lists all the sessions on your TS/Citrix server, including the information about the time they started-ended and information about total time user spent in active / idle /disconnected state during that session.

What are my users doing on the server?

Now you want to check summary for all user activity on terminal server. This way you will have insight how much of the time users are really working something on the server. TSL will allow you to have precise time in how much of the particular user was active, idle or disconnected from the server.

If only desktop for the end user is remote desktop connection, and for 7 hours of the 8 working hours some of the users were idle or disconnected then you will know that something is not good with employee, maybe he is not satisfied, maybe he just don’t like to work.

Summary of all applications usage (note on the screenshot there is summary for applications for Microsoft Office)

I would like to know if an employee is always late…
This want be a problem any more, TSL will allow you to capture exact time whan a user logged on your server. TSL will also capture the time user logged off.

If suspect that someone is connecting to your TS/Citrix server outside regular working hours you can use a built in report to see which users connected to your termianal server and processes they run during that session.

Conclusion

With TSL application logging you have powerful insight in all activities on your Terminal Server/Citrix. If you suspect that there is something fishy going on, TSL is the proper tool for you. It controls users and their sessions but also processes. With just one application you can monitor and anylze the productivity of your employees.

I am happy that we can announce Terminal services log 2.0. New appliactions next to user monitoring allows also application monitoring.

For all extra info please visit Terminal services log homepage.

Did you know that 32 bit applications consume 50% more memory on the 64 bit system?

But that is acceptable memory consume because today Terminal servers need much more memory than 4GB what is the limit of 32Bit system. 4GB of memory is enough for around 50 users, using regular office applications but for anything else 64bit system is a must have.

In last post I have described changes on /console and /admin switch in RDP clients newer then 6.0.

Now is possible to start console session from your PDA computer running windows mobile?

Unfortunately it is not. This makes a little sense because why do you want to administer your windows terminals erver from your PDA? But this makes no sense if you are on the road and only device you have with terminal services client is your PDA. This way you will need to call somebody to free TS CAL that you can connect and try to fix what is wrong.

With old rdp client versions up to 6 you were able to connect to console sessions of your terminal server by using mstsc /console” command.

In XP SP3 and vista SP1 there is no any more that switch, and now you have to use the /admin switch.

To me seems meaningless but on the internet they claim this is a reason because of an architectural change in Windows Server 2008. Session 0 is not interactive session, it is only used for services, and this way /console session is not different from any other session that is connected to windows 2008 terminal services.

The /admin switch is now used to access only session which is free of Terminal Services CALs.