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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Well it took some time but I patched Terminal Server for Windows 2008 to allow unlimited sessions in Remote Administration mode.

This patch is for 32 bit English version. In order to install it you need to perform the steps below. Before you start please check if using this patch is allowed according to your country’s law and your license agreement.

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Most administrator will want to prevent normal users from opening Regedit and a command prompt. Usually this is done by activating the “Prevent access to registry editing tools” and “Prevent access to the command prompt” policy settings. They are located under User Configuration | Administrative Templates | System:

Activating the policies will set the matching keys in the registry:

If we try to open regedit we are denied access:

So how does this work? (more…)

Vijayshinva Karnure wrote a very cool article about running Server 2008 as a desktop os or rather as a Windows Vista replacement. It seems that besides additional features like Hyper-V, Server 2008 runs approx. 20% faster than Vista.

If only upgrading Vista to Server 2008 would be possible… (has anyone ever tried)?

Links:

http://blogs.msdn.com/vijaysk/archive/2008/02/11/using-windows-server-2008-as-a-super-desktop-os.aspx

http://vista.blorge.com/2008/03/11/windows-server-2008-is-20-faster-than-vista/

Open Server Manager and in the Security Information tab click Configure IE ESC. An improvement in Server 2008 is that you can disable it for Administators but enable it for Normal Users, this is nice for Terminal Server and Citrix environments.

Even though Powershell is included with Windows Server 2008 it’s not installed by default. You can do this in Server Manager by going to Features and then Click Add Features in the Tasks bar on the right. Select Windows Powershell in the list and there you go!