the ramblings of a crazed IT administrator
Posts tagged Network Management
Managing Remote Desktop Sessions
11 year ago
As anyone who uses Remote Desktop a lot will by now know all too well, managing all those connections can be a real pain, especially if you need to make a config change that would normally require you to edit each connection manually.
Thankfully Microsoft has realised how much of a nightmare is (and how much the existing MMC plugin sucks badly), and they have provided us with a *much* better solution that is really easy to use and allows for logical grouping of servers into groups (and subgroups).
Once setup you can set default RDP preferences at an application, group or server level which means you can change an option in one place and have it apply to all your connections.
You can find out a bit more about the tool over on the MSExchangeTeam blog or you can jump right in and get the download from Microsoft here.
My New Best Friend – Introducing Spiceworks
11 year ago
So for the last few months I’ve been looking for ways to improve our ability to monitor our network (both the Servers and Desktops), we already have external monitors for the really important, business critical things like our website and email but for the day to day tracking of our desktops and less important servers we dont really have anything apart from me sticking my head in the server room every morning to check for flashing red lights! I’ve also been motivated to find a solution for tracking our desktop PC’s too after seeing one of my colleagues spend (literally), a whole week building a giant Excel spreadsheet to track both hardware and software on all our Desktop PC’s. While I am quite happy with Cacti and its ability to graph pretty much anything, it isn’t really designed for much more than this and so isn’t much use for tracking all the things I want to.
This is where Spiceworks comes in, it is a free (but ad supported), program that is designed for SMB’s to monitor and track their desktop and server infrastructure. Unlike almost every other program I have tried so far it is actually designed to be simple to use, no messing around trying to decipher config files or setup SNMP polling or anything like that, simply download the one .exe and install it on a spare Windows server (or desktop), the installer will install a copy of Apache and Ruby on Rails and make all the needed config changes, all you need to do is make sure that nothing else is running on the port you choose (such as another webserver like IIS or Apache).
