Windows OS

Think of it as MOM-lite.

The Terminal Services Management Pack for Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 monitors the health and performance of Terminal Services components. It includes a rich set of views, tasks, and reports, and provides monitoring for Terminal Services, the Licensing Server, and the Session Directory.

This Management Pack detects and alerts problems with performance, health, and availability. It can automatically respond to critical events and performance indicators. In some cases it identifies issues before they become critical, enabling you to increase the overall availability and performance of your Windows operating systems.

Download it here.

Think of it as MOM-lite.

The Terminal Services Management Pack for Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 monitors the health and performance of Terminal Services components. It includes a rich set of views, tasks, and reports, and provides monitoring for Terminal Services, the Licensing Server, and the Session Directory.

This Management Pack detects and alerts problems with performance, health, and availability. It can automatically respond to critical events and performance indicators. In some cases it identifies issues before they become critical, enabling you to increase the overall availability and performance of your Windows operating systems.

Download it here.

You might want to not install the 'Desktop Experience' feature on Longhorn terminal servers and/or disable Aero for clients, because each terminal services session spawns a new instance of DWM on the server.

The client does most of the heavy lifting drawing Aero, but I could forsee DWM becoming the ctfmon.exe of Windows Longhorn Server if you enable Aero for TS sessions.

Of course, with 64-bit terminal servers and gobs of ram, it isn't going to matter too much overall. I am thinking more along the lines of future SBS servers.

This tip originated from Eric Holk at MS on the LH TS newsgroups, btw, to give credit where credit is due.

Just a quick heads up!

LH Beta 3 came out yesterday, and to go along with it, so did Network Access Protection (NAP) Beta 3. You can install the client on XP machines and other operating systems.

NAP is going to be a very nice feature for corporate networks and especially terminal servers. You can configure a terminal server to require connecting clients to send a health report on connect. If the client doesn't meet standards, they will be blocked and/or required to install updates/software.

Terminal Services Broker Service is taking the place of Terminal Server Session Directory and added a bit of load balancing logic into the mix.

There are a lot of cool things coming with Longhorn server.
The four areas I am most interested in are the terminal server enhancements, hypervisor, NAP, and the Core.

If you want to learn more about NAP, make sure to check out this blog.

Simply delete this key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MobilePC\TMM

More details here.

Too many to list here. Basically, if you are using the Storport.sys on Server 2003, you'll want to investigate this update. A lot of services/programs depend on this driver.

This updates you to build 5.2.3790.4021, built in March of 2007, and is newer than what is in Windows 2003 SP2, much like the DST patch.

Microsoft has an updated KB article on Windows 2003 Server clusters that run Service Pack 2, much like they had for SP1 and RTM.

I am surprised that Adobe didn't create this themselves but they seem pretty anti-Microsoft lately anyway.
Check it out here.

It needs Adobe Reader 7.x or higher installed for the API calls, so that is noteworthy for FoxIt users.
It also needs .Net 2.0 Framework, but 99% of the users running Office 2007 and/or Vista will have that installed already.

You just need to use the driver mod here.

It will "add" support for the following Mobility chipsets:

FireGL:
T2/T2e
V3100/V3200/V5000/V5200

Radeon:
9500/9550/9600/9700/9800
X300/X600/X700/X800/X800 XT
X1300/X1400/X1450/X1600
X1700/X1800/X1800 XT
X2300/X2300 HD
XPRESS 200/XPRESS 200M

A summary of a very informative post here.

Number 1 - Partitioning within the Unattend.xml
Number 2 - XP disk partitioning
Number 3 - Trying to deploy images with WDS
Number 4 - Failure to join the domain
Number 5 - Drivers
Number 6 - Creating custom WIM image without using /flags
Number 7 - SQL connectivity
Number 8 - Memory requirements for Vista PE
Number 9 - Not removing the MININT folder
Number 10 - Adding Windows PE to console

If you are curious of the details, go read the post!

Another reason to disable the DNS RPC until a patch is available. Read more about it here.

It is better to disable a feature you don't need or use (most likely) before the weekend hits.

If you are wondering what I am talking about, check out the link here and the advice for a large scale scripted rollout here.

Want to disable locally from the command line?
reg add HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\DNS\Parameters /v RpcProtocol /t REG_DWORD /d 4

Want to disable a remote server from the command line?
reg add \\[servername]\HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\DNS\Parameters /v RpcProtocol /t REG_DWORD /d 4

Restart the DNS service and you are good to go.