2008 June | Terminal Services Log - Blog

Archive for June, 2008

Difference between USERS and DEVICE Terminal CALs?

Many people will ask what is the difference between users and device CAL when purchasing licenses for terminal services. CALs have different scenarios that I will explain.

If you have more users than clients (like in a classroom, where multiple people connect to the Terminal services from shared client workstations), then per Device licensing is a cheaper and better choice.

If you have more clients than users (users connect from multiple clients, for example their office PC, a laptop and their PC at home), then per User licensing is the cheaper and better choice.

June 11th, 2008 | Tags: Terminal Services Licensing
Posted in Terminal Services Licensing | By: Frane Borozan | No Comments »

Default desktop color for all users

Do you have a problem when all your users have boring gray as default color? I think nice blue is much better than gray.
You can modify the Default User profile on the Terminal services with the desktop color that you like, which will give all new users your new background color.

For existing users, you can delete their profiles, or if that isn’t possible, export the registry entry for the desktop color (under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Colors key background ) and import it in their profile at logon, in a logon script.

June 11th, 2008 | Tags: desktop color
Posted in Terminal services | By: Frane Borozan | No Comments »

Terminal services per device licensing and thin clients

I have noted that sometimes some Wyse thin clients require new device CAL from terminal services licensing every time they boot.
This is a bug in Wyse firmware and it should be fixed by Wyse support team. It happens only on certain devices.

Why is this important?
Lets say you have 50 thin clients and 50 device CALs for terminal services. If one device requests two licenses, one device will not be able to connect as there is no device CAL available any more.
You will ask Wyse team to help you and their answer is trivial: change terminal services licensing in per user mode!
This is only a temporary fix. This way you will need to track available user CALs by yourself. Why is this soltuion from Wyse? It is because terminal CAL is not tracked in per user mode, per user mode is fully implemented only in Windows 2008 server terminal services.
They should fix this bug ASAP.

June 5th, 2008 | Tags: Terminal Services Licensing
Posted in Terminal Services Licensing | By: Frane Borozan | 1 Comment »

Printing too slow through Terminal services over WAN

Do you have your terminal server on DSL line that has low upload bandwidth? Maybe 256Kbit or so?Yes?

We had one server setup on this bandwidth. If your users are just connecting to server and typing something there, in 256 colors (8bit) client speed experience will be just fine.
Then after users type something in a Word document or something else, they want that on paper. No problem, file > print.
Spooler service sends a few megabytes large file to the client printer, although the user typed one page.
We want to minimize spooler job to be as small as possible, because we have a very slow connection for printing in high resolution.
First thing is to lower DPI from 1200 to 300 or so. This will speed up printing a lot.
On HP printers (that we often use on terminal services because lots of HP printers are certified with terminal services) there is one more option to set that can speed up the printing process.
Disable advanced printing options in:
Printing Preferences -> Paper Quality -> Advanced -> Document Options -> Advanced Printing Features (Disable).
Now the user printing should be much faster than before.

June 5th, 2008 | Tags: Printing too slow through Terminal services
Posted in Terminal services | By: Frane Borozan | No Comments »

If spoolsv is in error state

Yesterday explained how to restart spoolsv server (printer spooler) if it exceeds 40MB of memory.
Sometimes spooler service will hang and there will not be high memory consumption, so we would need to detect that problem as well. For this scenario I have written the following script:
net start | findstr /i Spooler > nul if not errorlevel 1 goto end net stop Spooler sleep 2 net start Spooler :end exit
I created a scheduled task to run this script under system every minute, for 24 hours a day. If spoolsv is OK, the script will just close, and if it is in error state, the script will restart the printer spooler service.

June 4th, 2008 | Tags: spoolsv error state
Posted in printing terminal services | By: Frane Borozan | 1 Comment »

Active process per user and past active time of processes

The new version of the application will include the feature of current viewing process per selected user and process that was used in the past for selected users.
This way you can view active process per users in live monitor. OK what is the deal, you will ask. I can see that data in task manager as well?!
The difference here is that there will be past reports of application usage available. You will be able to create reports such as:
- Who is using which application? - How many instances of Internet Explorer did the USER have on Terminal Server in the past month? - How many times has the USER used Internet Explorer this week? - When Terminal Server crashed yesterday at 08:02:13, who was running which application? - Can I see USERS favorite applications ranked by execution count?

Sample screenshot for user administrator with only current session report times per application:
You can note that terminal services user oriented processes are run from the session logon, and applications like Total Commander run for 7 minutes, Firefox runs for 3 minutes and so on.
Terminal services log for Citrix and Microsoft active processes

June 1st, 2008 | Tags: Active process per user
Posted in development | By: Frane Borozan | No Comments »

Summary for all users

As mentioned before, we are in rapid new application version development of Terminal Services Log.
Today we will talk about summary times of all users on Microsoft Terminal Server or Citrix XenApp.
Summary of all users will be available in two reports, summary for all users on terminal server or summary per selected users.
First report will generate the usage of all users connected to the server in a selected time period.
Second report will generate reports only of selected users, meaning that you can for example, select all users from the sales department to report on how much they did in a selected time period.

Screenshot for new feature is available:
terminal services log summary times of all users connected

This is only one example of the new features that the new version of terminal services log will offer.

June 1st, 2008 | Tags: Summary for all users
Posted in development | By: Frane Borozan | No Comments »

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