My first article at VirtualizationAdmin.com

Today my first article at VirtualizationAdmin.com was published. You can read the introduction of the article below. Use the link to read the complete article!

Printing in Microsoft RDS environments and how it evolved in todays technology

"...As you might know RDS stands for Remote Desktop Services, previously known as Terminal Services and designed to have multiple user sessions hosted on a single server. Now it is called Session Virtualization. These sessions have grown out to becoming complete local desktop replacements. What activity is one of the most frequent user actions on a desktop? Exactly, printing!
Therefore, whether to allow printing from a session is not the question. The question is how to configure it in the most convenient way from the end-users perspective and easy to maintain from the administrators perspective. In this article, we’ll discuss printing in Microsoft RDS environments, what printing from a remote session was like in the past and how it evolved in today’s technology..."

Read the complete article here:
http://www.virtualizationadmin.com/articles-tutorials/vdi-articles/general/printing-microsoft-rds-environments-how-evolved-todays-technology.html

Announcing the new TechNet Forum Assistant !

Introducing the TechNet Forum Assistant
TechNet Forum Assistant
The TechNet Forum Assistant is a free Windows gadget, available in the Microsoft Download Centre. This gadget will help you better utilize the great information in TechNet Forums and community. By downloading, you have the support and expertise of Microsoft TechNet Forum Support Engineers directly right on your desktop. Receive support on your terms by downloading the TechNet Forum Assistant.

Ask Questions
The TechNet Forum Assistant enables you to ask questions directly to our dedicated TechNet Forum Support Engineers. With a click of your mouse, you can choose your favourite thread among the numerous topics available in the TechNet Forums.

Hot Topics & Resources
The TechNet Forum Assistant instantly directs you to the hottest questions and discussions, professional technique recommendations for development and free sample code from the All-In-One Code Framework. Searching through your forum threads has never been easier. With TechNet Forum Assistant you can search through your threads directly from your desktop.

Receive Personalized Updates
The TechNet Forum Assistant conveniently gathers forum threads which are of interest to you. By selecting your favourite forums, the Forum Assistant provides updates on the most recent threads, making your online support experience much more convenient and hassle free.

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27747

NEW: Remote Desktop Services TechNet wiki for Windows Server 2008 R2

The Microsoft RDS product team has been working on the Remote Desktop Services TechNet wiki for Windows Server 2008 R2 and would like to encourage you to use it and contribute information you think would be useful to other people deploying Remote Desktop Services.

Link:http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/275.aspx#R

Source:http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2011/11/21/help-finding-remote-desktop-services-information-online.aspx

Looking for a specific GPO setting, corresponding registry key or corresponding .admx file?

When you work with Group Policy Objects (GPO’s) regularly, or even better, when you don’t work with GPO’s regularly, the following scenario’s will sound familiar.

- I know this GPO setting exists, I know it had the words “Delegating Saved Credentials” in it but where is that specific policy in the GPO tree?

- I have this GPO setting here, but what is the corresponding registry key?

- I have this GPO setting here, but what is the corresponding .admx file?

- I have this GPO setting here, but is a logoff required

Save yourself some time searching the net and bookmark the following page: (or this blog post J)
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=25250

It contains several fully searchable Excel sheets, which contain GPO settings with columns like policy setting name, scope, admx file, registry key etc!

These sheets have been around for some time, but I thought it might be useful information to give it some extra attention.

There also is a online variant here: http://gps.cloudapp.net/

The taskbar may not show the application name correctly when using a Terminal Server RemoteApp

A new KB article was released by Microsoft yesterday related to the display of an incorrect name in the taskbar when using a Remote App. The workaround that Microsoft offers however seems a bit disappointing :-). But I’m sure they’ll fix this issue in a upcoming hotfix.

Article ID: 2642873 - Last Review: November 17, 2011 - Revision: 1.0

The taskbar may not show the application name correctly when using a Terminal Server RemoteApp

source: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2642873/en-us?sd=rss&spid=14134

Resolving "Remote Desktop Disconnected" or "Unable to Connect to Remote Desktop (Terminal Server)"

Solutions for errors such as “Unable to RDP,” “Remote Desktop Disconnected,” or “Unable to Connect to Remote Desktop (Terminal server)” are frequently asked for on TechNet Forums. There are 4 commonly seen Symptoms to this error:

1. You may be limited in the number of users who can connect simultaneously to a Remote Desktop session or Remote Desktop Services session
2. You may have a Port assignment conflict
3. You may have an incorrectly configured Authentication and Encryption setting
4. You may have a corrupted Certificate

The corresponding KB is:
Article ID: 186645 - Last Review: December 22, 2010 - Revision: 3.0
Troubleshooting RDP Client connection problems
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/186645

For more details check this blog post by the Remote Desktop Services (Terminal Services) Team:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2011/01/10/how-to-resolve-the-issue-remote-desktop-disconnected-or-unable-to-connect-to-remote-desktop-terminal-server.aspx

Running RD Gateway on a different port then 443 (Windows Server 8)

If you have been working with the Remote Desktop Gateway (RDGW) or with the previous version, the Terminal Services Gateway (TSGW), you’ll probably know that running the RDGW on a different port then port 443 is not possible (or at least not supported).

Good news is coming for organizations that needed this functionality (and I have seen requests for this on Technet Forums on multiple occasions). Running RD gateway on a different port than port 443 will be possible on Windows Server 8! Even better, this setting is easily accessible from within the RD Gateway manager and can be changed within a few clicks.

In this blog post I’ll quickly show you how to configure this.

When you installed the RD Gateway via the new Server Manager (either remotely or locally) the RD Gateway Manager Manager will be available. When you open up the manager it looks quite a lot like the RDGW Manager in Windows Server 2008 R2.

However, when we open up the properties of the RDGW server we’ll notice a new tab there called Transport Settings.

On this tab we have several options. We can change the IP address that the RD Gateway listens on. By default this is "All Unassigned", but we now have the ability to easily set this to a single specific IP-address that exists on the server. Useful when your RD Gateway server has multiple IP-addresses and you want to narrow this down to a single one.

New here is the ability to change the port that RD Gateway server listens on. So let’s test this functionality and change that to a different port. We’ll choose and set port 999 for now.

We get a warning that listener rules will be modified in the Windows Firewall and, of course, all active sessions will be disconnected, as the RD Gateway server will be restarted.

When we run a netstat we see that the RDGW is now running on 999 instead of 443.

Now let’s try to connect to the a RD Session Host using the new RD Gateway port. We open up a mstsc, enter the hostname of the RDSH and the necessary credentials. On the advanced tab using the settings button we configure the RD Gateway settings as show below.

We save the settings and try to connect. We get the error below:

“A valid gateway server address must be specified”. Why do we get this error? We tried to connect using a Remote Desktop Client supporting RDP 7.0 and apparently Remote Desktop Protocol version 7.0 does not support this.

So we open up a Windows 8 client, run mstsc and try the same configuration. This time successfully!

We’re now able to save the RD Gateway properties of the client and start a new session, and thus connect using a RD Gateway server on port 999.

Once connected we open up the connection details of the session where secure connection on port 999 is now displayed:

Conclusion: RD Gateway running on Windows Server 8 will support changing the port that the gateway listens on. A pre-requisite for this to work is using a Remote Desktop Client that supports Remote Desktop Protocol 8.0