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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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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In part 1 I showed how to create and open objects in Terminal Server Sessions. However, these are not all of the possible places where you can place objects via documented kernel32.dll functions.

If we look into Winobj again, we notice, that every BaseNamedObjects directory has a subdirectory named Restricted. To be honest, I do not know why it’s created; it’s security allows object creation for LocalSystem and RESTRICTED special user (in windows 2000, Everyone can also create objects in it). So, we can use it as prefix for object creation, for example, Restricted\MyAppEvent:

Of course, you can still use Global, Local, or Session links (more…)

As you know, many kernel32.dll functions, which are working with named objects, like OpenEvent, can be used to work with global and local objects. So what are global and local objects? Global objects are created in session 0 and are actually located in the \BaseNamedObjects directory, while local objects are created in the caller’s session (for example in the \Sessions\5\BaseNamedObjects directory (for session 0, global and local has no meaning since they point to the same object)). MSDN says that you can access only the objects in your own session(via the Local\ prefix) and in session 0 (via the Global\ prefix). But what if you need to access an object in another session? (more…)

In part 1 I’ve showed how to get rid of some terminal server restrictions on Windows xp x64. But there are still some problems:

1) You cannot connect to the localhost (127.0.0.1) (but can to 127.a.b.c, where a,b,c in [0..255] (except 127.0.0.0 and 127.255.255.255)).

When you’re connecting to remote server, Remote Desktop Connection (mstsc.exe) checks through mtscax.dll that you’re connecting to your own address, connections are only allowed and you’re in the server mode. If this is not true, the connection is denied, usually with this message: . The logic of checking is the same: call gethostbyname for server name and check if it’s not equal to 127.0.0.1. (more…)