Month: April 2012

Being an IT Technician, I run into all sorts of technical issues. One of my client’s Terminal Servers needed to be rebooted about once a month, and I wanted to find out why. After doing some research, I found an article on the Microsoft site that gives a description of the problem and a resolution.

There is a known issue with Terminal Server that causes it to keep RDP connections open even after the user disconnects. This creates extra load on the server over time and dramatically slows it down. Here is a link to the article:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2012/03/06/performance-issues-due-to-inactive-terminal-server-ports.aspx

By: Tony Purkey

(Source: Skynet Solutions)

I can remember, when I was a kid, going to my local library and bookstore to get the latest printed BBS listings for my area. In my opinion, Bulletin Board Systems were the beginning of the internet for the general public. I had a 386 or 486 running at a blazing speed of 33MHz with a connection speed of 2400 baud. Excalibur, AOL, and other similar sharing sites came up soon before the dot-com era boomed.

Everything has been fairly steady in the internet world until people and companies started trying to beat everyone to the punch with new browsers and languages. But what has really started a tear in the interweb’s fabric is the premature use and implementation of HTML5.

As it stands now, HTML5 is not a standard, and it is not supported, however you still find big names boasting about their compatibility with this non-standardized language. Every big name in the tech field has their own internet browser, and they are using this to their disguised advantage to make the user feel as if they are ahead of the curve. It ends up being a finger pointing contest to what company or browser fails to be the best at something, but all we really want is across the board functionality for all devices.

Who originally proposed the start and development of HTML5? I bet you wouldn’t guess it started with one of the least used browsers, Opera from Opera Software. Since then every big boy on the playground has stripped it from their grips and is claiming it as their own, but there is a catch: you have to use their browser because the language is developed in a proprietary way that only allows viewing with their software. So where is this going? Advertising? Control? Web content monitoring? You can decide for yourself.

Currently there is no date on the final standardized release of HTML5 according to World Wide Web Consortium. There are plenty of supported APIs between browsers, but in the end, this early adoption HTML5 is causing big confusion for people everywhere around the world.

(Source: Skynet Solutions)

By Clint Smith

I’ve been consulting and supporting corporate IT infrastructure for several years now. Lately, much of my work has been in remote desktop and network support, from walking remote users through program operation to installing software and devices. Remote support tools are necessary for almost any IT pro.

I’m sure many of you have used Microsoft’s RDP client to connect to systems. RDP is great for management of servers and systems where there is very little direct user access to the desktop. In my experience though, having access to the user’s desktop and sharing what the user sees is instrumental in solving problems. RDP is hindered in this due to the fact that when you RDP into a machine, the user cannot see the session on their monitor. RDP is also limited to professional versions of Windows and Windows specifically. In a lot of cases, I do not have complete control over the provisioning of systems, and supporting home versions of Windows and also OSX is a must.

This is where joinme.com comes in. It creates a connection to the active console session of the user’s computer, be it any flavor of Windows or OSX. Simply type in joinme.com into your browser of choice, and then have your user do the same. The user will need to click the share option on the joinme.com website. Depending on the browser and browser settings, it will prompt to download or run the joinme program. At this point, have your user run and then click allow to any UAC prompts. When it’s done installing, the joinme toolbar will be displayed at the top of the screen. Simply request from the user the 9-digit number displayed in this toolbar. Type this number into the join field on joinme.com on your computer and click join. Your remote user’s desktop will be displayed inside the browser. If you want control of the user’s desktop? You now have the ability to manipulate their system.

One small caveat to note is UAC enabled systems will freeze the joinme connection anytime a UAC prompt is displayed on the remote user’s computer. If you expect to encounter UAC prompts during your remote session, you can do one of two things. Direct the user to respond to the UAC prompt, and the joinme connection will reestablish. You may also disable UAC which will avoid the freezes completely. Joinme is a free to use service for non-commercial purposes. They do have a pay for service option that among other things offers a more robust application to connect to users’ desktops instead of running inside the browser. Hopefully this helps those of you that are looking for an easy solution to remote support.

(Source: Skynet Solutions)

By Dustin Fry