Remko Weijnen's Blog (Remko's Blog)

About Virtualization, VDI, SBC, Application Compatibility and anything else I feel like

I’m working on a new build of TSAdminEx for which I need to query the total amount of physical memory. Locally we can use the GlobalMemoryStatusEx API but there’s no API to do this remotely. It would be possible using WMI but I decided not to use that because I dislike it because of it’s slowness and I need support for older OS versions which might not have WMI.

So I found in the registry the following key:

HKLM\HARDWARE\RESOURCEMAP\System Resources\Physical Memory

It has a value .Translated of type RES_RESOURCE_LIST which seems undocumented besides stating that it exists. Regedit knows how to handle it though. If you doubleclick on the key you will see something like this:

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TSAdminEx Features Part 3

Beta ReleasePart 1Part 2  

This is part 3 of the TSAdminEx Features series. Today I will discuss the Process View. As usual we will start by comparing TSAdmin to TSAdminEx again. So let’s look at TSAdmin Process View:

TSAdminProcess

And the one from TSAdminEx:

TSAdminExProcessView

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TSAdminEx Features Part 2

Part1

Now that a TSAdminEx beta is ready I will be showing you some features. In this part I will show the Sessions View.

Let’s start again with a compare of TSAdmin and TSAdminEx:

TSAdminSessionView

TSAdminExSessionView

As you can see TSAdminEx shows more details, it shows the following extra columns:

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TSAdminEx Features Part 1

Part 2

Now that a TSAdminEx beta is ready I will be showing you some features. In this part 1 I will be comparing the Users view to TSAdmin.

Let’s start TSAdmin, this tool is present by default on Windows 2003. If you use Windows XP or Windows Vista you can get it by installing the Administration Pack. Please note that TSAdmin does not work on Vista RTM due to a bug that was corrected in Vista SP1 (TSAdminEx works fine on both RTM as well as SP1)

TSAdmin1

Now let’s open TSAdminEx and start comparing…

TSAdminEx1

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TSAdminEx Beta release

Over the last months I have been working hard on TSAdminEx and now, finally, I can now present a first beta release.

If you don’t know what TSAdminEx is let me briefly introduce it. TSAdminEx is a tool that combines functionality of several existing tools: it has the power of task manager combined with the details of Process Explorer and the Terminal Server support of TSAdmin. On top of that it fully supports remote systems out of the box without installing any agents or services. It also has some unique features that neither of the mentioned tools can do!

Several new features have been implemented since the last time I talked about TSAdminEx and I will show you the most exciting ones here:

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TSAdminEx Progress

I just wanted to show some of the progress that I made in development of TSAdminEx. I thought the best way would be to show some screenshots. Which reminds me I installed a nice Javascript to enlarge the thumbnails, click to see it…

Edit: A beta is ready!

This screenshot shows TSAdminEx after startup. In the Left Treeview you can see the This Computer, Favorites and All Listed Servers icon. On Startup all available domains are enumerated.
Here you see the Users tab. If you move the mouse over some columns you can get extra info in the hint. In this hint you get the actual shadow permissions of the highlighted session.
This is the Sessions tab where extra details of a session are shown. By default you can see sessions statistics such as Incomingbytes and Outgoingbytes, this makes it easy to identify sessions that have much traffic.Interesting detail is that the Remote Address column lists the real ip address that is connected to Terminal Server! Hovering the mouse also shows the port number.
Now the Process tab is my favorite! It lists far more details than TSAdmin and also some usefull columns that cannot be show with TSAdmin or any documented Terminal Server API!The Process Age columns shows how long the process is running. You can compare this with the CPU Time column to see how much CPU Time the process has allocated since startup.The Mem Usage shows the amount of physical RAM a process uses while the VM Size column shows the amount of Private Bytes (Virtual Memory) a process uses.
If you click on a domain in the Left Treeview, TSAdminEx will enumerate all Terminal Servers for that domain. You can continue using and even enumerate multiple domains, because enumeration is done from seperate threads!
If you select (highlight) a particular session the appropriate toolbar buttons are enabled or disabled automically indicating the actions that can be performed on the selected session.
And offcourse, an about dialog…

Hope you like it! Comments are open…

TSAdminEx

You will probably know Microsofts Tool to Manage Terminal Server, it’s called Terminal Services Manager (you will probably know it as TSAdmin). It can be used to view information about terminal servers including all sessions, users, and processes for each terminal server.

TSAdmin Screenshot

I’m currently working on a TSAdmin replacement (codename TSAdminEx). Purpose is to show how to use the Terminal Server API’s and as a little bonus we will add some extra functionality to TSAdminEx.

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