Windows Vista introduced the Command Bar in Explorer which is sometimes also referred to as the Folder Band or the Task Band. The Command Bar is of course also present in Windows 7 and Server 2008 (R2).

This Command Bar shows possible tasks or actions depending on the active folder. I wanted to remove the “Uninstall or change a program” (in Dutch this is called “Een programma verwijderen of wijzigen”) button from the Computer view:

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I needed to add a printer connection to a Citrix server but the problem was that this printer had a buggy driver. I wanted to use an alternative driver such as the Citrx Universal Printer driver but on Terminal Server you might want to use the Terminal Services Easy Print driver.

So I decided to make something that could be used in both situations, the result is a small commandline tool called AddPrinter2 (sorry I am not good in finding original names).

It takes 2 parameters: the printername as unc path and the driver name. An example would be:

AddPrinter2 “\\server\printer” “Citrix Universal Printer”.

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For a long time now people have asked for a version of LaunchRDP that includes the Connection Bar. The original version was originally written for a very specific purpose and I never anticipated so many people would want to use it. But it seems that a lot of people like the Connection Bar (I hate it, especially with sessions in sessions, so that’s why I am using RDPWithLocalTaskbar).

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In this topic I just want to show(case) you something I created in the past. It is a management console that enables delegated management in a Terminal Server or Citrix environment.

The console is launched by a small executable that check credentials (based on group membership) and then launches an RDP session with the actual console in it. The logic behind it is that the RDP session runs with an account with delegated permissions in Active Directory and the actual user account that logs in here doesn’t have any permissions at all.

This is the login screen:

If you’ve passed the login screen you enter the Main Console which consists of a Treeview on the left with possible options and a work area on the right:

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As you might know Microsoft distributes updates and hotfixes with in installer, update.exe. When you run update.exe it looks into the supplied .inf files to see what it has to install. It’s not possible to make changes to the inf files however because that will invalidate it’s signature (and update.exe checks the signature that is stored in an accompanying .cat file).

In my case I wanted to deploy the MUI pack for Internet Explorer 7 to be able to support multiple languages. By default this pack installs 35 (!) languages and I wanted to install only Dutch language on top of existing English.

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A few days ago I was troubleshooting some strange problems on a Citrix Server. After some investigation (I will write about that later) it was clear to me that there was a shortage of System Page Table Entries (PTE’s). Using perfmon you can see how many free System PTE’s are available:

Any value below 5000 is not good, values below 2000 are critical. In my case it wasn’t possible to view processes with Task Manager anymore.

Next I used WinDbg and attached to the Kernel (you can do that with File | Kernel Debug | Local | OK) and issued the !vm command:

WinDbg shows us a warning that a lot of PTE allocations have failed, we can also see that there’s enough Paged Pool and Non Paged Pool available.

So how do we find the guilty driver (usually it’s a driver)? (more…)

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Existing code to simulate the Secure Attention Sequence (SAS),which most people refer to as control alt delete or ctrl-alt-del, no longer works in Windows Vista. It seems that Microsoft offers a library that exports a function called SimulateSAS(). It is not public and one is supposed to request it by sending a mail to saslib@microsoft.com. Mails to this address remain unanswered though.

I researched how other people (including Microsoft) have solved this task and was unhappy with the results: some solutions work only with (or without) UAC, most solutions work only for the current or console Terminal Server sessions or need a kernel mode driver.

So I decided to create my own Saslib with the following goals:

• Should work both with and without User Account Control (UAC)
• Should support current, console and any Terminal Server session
• Does not need a driver
• The calling application does not need to be signed or have a special manifest
• Support multiple programming languages

I have succeeded and thus SasLibEx was born: not only can it successfully simulate the SAS sequence it can do this for any/all Terminal Server sessions. It can also lock the workstation (again for all sessions) and switch between the normal desktop and the secure desktop (the desktop that UAC runs on). SasLibEx was successfully tested both with and without User Account Control (UAC).

In the future I will place SasLibEx on it’s own website. Meanwhile you can contact me if you are interested in it at the following mail address:

Please note that I have spend lots of time into this project and therefore I cannot give it away for free

Update: I have added new features to SasLibEx, see here: http://www.remkoweijnen.nl/blog/2009/04/07/saslibex-updates/

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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:

And the one from TSAdminEx:

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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:

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

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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)

Now let’s open TSAdminEx and start comparing…

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