Kudos for TSAC
In Tricks & Traps: "Daily Answers" (September 15, 2001), Sean Daily answers a question from a reader about how to create custom Terminal Services Advanced Client (TSAC) Web consoles. The answer references "Remotely Manage Your Win2K Servers" (April 2001), which includes information about Microsoft's TSAC Web client and where to find it (http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/downloads/recommended/tsac). I'm amazed that the Windows 2000 Server and Win2K Server Terminal Services documentation doesn't mention TSAC at all. TSAC saves me from having to distribute disks with instructions for setting up Comtrol's RocketPort Modem Card, a VPN, and more. I've been using Terminal Services for about 2 months without knowledge of this little jewel, so I appreciate it all the more (not to mention that configuring it took all of 5 minutes).
—Patrick C. Rouse
prouse@ocasf.org
I agree with your observation about the stealthiness of the TSAC Web client in the Microsoft documentation. I find it ironic how Microsoft sometimes overhypes its bad products and underhypes its good ones.
—Sean Daily
Win2K Recovery Console
I read Paula Sharick's "The ABCs of Win2K Recovery and Repair" (August 2001), which discusses when to use Windows 2000's Emergency Repair Disk (ERD), Safe Mode, and the Recovery Console (RC). I was intrigued by the statement that you can run the RC on a Windows NT 4.0 installation. The article also explains how to allow automatic administrative access and access to all drives and folders. But the article tells you how to do those things on only Win2K.
If you use the RC on an NT 4.0 installation, you're restricted to the default folders unless you add the following registry entries under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Setup\RecoveryConsole subkey: SecurityLevel (of type REG_DWORD, value 0--disabled) and SetCommand (of type REG_DWORD, value 1--enabled). These values are the same as those that the Group Policy snap-in makes on Win2K, and manually adding these keys to an NT 4.0 installation works just fine.
—Jeff Hill
jeffhill@yamazen.com
Application-Deployment Tools
I read Tom Iwanski's "Application-Deployment Tools" (August 2001), which reviews five such tools. The article covers most of the concerns I've dealt with in running a large software-distribution operation for the past few years, but I wonder why the article didn't include some of the heavyweight tools in this category: Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS), Tivoli Systems' Tivoli Software Distribution, Computer Associate's (CA's) Unicenter Software Delivery, and Novadigm's Radia.
We're a large enterprise (70,000 seats), and these products are the only tools that made our evaluation list. Admittedly, SMS, Tivoli, and Unicenter come with a fair amount of baggage, but many large organizations need this baggage (e.g., remote control, inventory, monitoring, management). Radia and SMS don't really require much beyond the inventory and software distribution and management that they supply.
—Tom Cornwell
tom.w.cornwell@kp.org
This product feature looks at a representative sample of purpose-specific products that don't fall in the category of framework solutions. I settled on this approach because I needed to narrow the field of players yet still meet the needs of a large number of IT shops that want functionality without the "baggage" you mention. In the future, we'll look at some of the other products in this key area.*
—Tom Iwanski
OOPS
New & Improved: "Monitor, Ping, and Reset Services" (October 2001) contains an incorrect phone number for Kesem Technology. The correct toll-free number is 877-808-4975.
In "AD Disaster Recovery" (August 2001), Listing 1: Ntdsutil Cleanup Command Sequence is missing one line. The line before the last one (Remove selected server) should be Quit. The correct listing is available for downloading at http://www.win2000mag.com. Enter 21509 in the InstantDoc ID text box, and go to the Article Information box to download the 21509.zip file. We apologize for any inconvenience these errors might have caused.
End of Article
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