I confess: I like group policies. They are and have always been a great way of managing computer and user settings ever since their conception and introduction with Windows 2000. Of course, at the beginning management tools were nonexistent. But we were so happy not to have to rely on NT4’s system policies any more that we did not even notice. Then came GPMC, and life started to become truly great. RSOP! Group Policy modelling! Those are great tools for every admin!

I recently had the requirement to refresh the Windows desktop after certain changes had been made to Explorer’s registry entries. This seems simple at first: klick on any item on the desktop and then press F5. It wasn’t, though. The registry changes would be made upon logon by a software installation agent. It was expected by the customer that the end user see the the effects of the change immediately without any user intervention. That sent me hunting for a solution on the internet. I came across many forum posts that showed that many others already had exactly the same requirement. Interestingly, none of the proposed solutions actually worked. Except for one, which I found at last.

My colleague Nicholas Dille has started his own blog. Nicholas is a very clever guy whose opinion I value very much. I have often worked and laughed with him in the past couple of years. It has always been both fun and technically challenging. Expect interesting, little-known and well-researched technical content from him.

Most technical folks have stumbled across the registry hive HKEY_USERS\.Default at some point. Many of them think they know what it is used for. Interestingly, most who do are wrong.

Update: The ADM file can now be downloaded here. I recently came across a post in the Windows Server Performance Team’s blog that lists several registry values which can be used to tune Explorer’s SMB performance by modifying the following:

Did you know that Windows Server contains a file system quota component? “Of course”, you will say. It was introduced with Windows 2000 and is completely useless since it only allows for volume-level quotas. That is true, but at the same time, it is nowadays quite irrelevant. With the R2 update to Windows Server 2003 Microsoft finally got it right and introduced the optional component File Server Resource Manager (FSRM). With FSRM, folder-level quotas find their way into the (professional) lives of administrators who do not care for additional third-party filter drivers that are prone to destabilize production servers.

Nearly every professional working with Citrix Presentation Server knows about Program Neighborhood (PN), and some may even use it frequently. It was first introduced in MetaFrame 1.8 and is used to start published applications from one or more server farms. In PN you can either configure individual applications or define application groups. The latter are simply lists of published applications which PN pulls from a designated Presentation Server and displays in its UI.

Have you ever tried to log on to a terminal server and, after entering your credentials, been forced to stare at a grey screen for a lengthy period of time wondering what the machine might actually be doing? Of course you have, along with a few million other terminal server users. Being a technical guy (you would not be reading this otherwise) you have checked CPU / memory / hard disk utilization and the current session count when users complain that logons are slow. You will probably have noticed that all relevant metrics are in the green and logons are the slower, the more users try to log on to a server concurrently. It turns out that parallel logons are the root cause of the problem. Why?

In an earlier post I wrote about how bandwidth requirements of the RDP protocol are affected by enabling font smoothing (ClearType over RDP version 6) on Windows Server 2008. Jan, a reader of that article, posted an interesting comment: he had heard that RDP version 6 was optimized for a color depth of 32 bits and asked me to repeat my tests with that setting, which leads to an interesting question: how is font smoothing bandwidth usage affected by the color depth used?

A question on the terminal services newsgroup brought this topic to my attention: how can be determined programmatically if a Windows Server 2008 system is a terminal server and whether it runs in application server or remote administration mode?

In an earlier post I wrote about a great technology that finally makes it into terminal services with Windows Server 2008: ClearType or Font Smoothing, as it is sometimes called. I will stick to the term ClearType for the time being.

[Updated 2009-12-11 for Server 2008 R2] Microsoft has published two visually very appealing posters which depict in great detail important components of its upcoming OS Server 2008. The poster on Active Directory Components details Lightweight Directory Services (formerly ADAM), Federation Services (ADFS), Rights Management Services, Group Policy, Management and Read-Only Domain Controller.

This post covers a technology developed by Microsoft Research in the late 90s that finally made it into terminal services: ClearType. ClearType As is sometimes the case with technology, it is difficult to explain how it works, yet easy to see the benefits. Let us start with the easy part.

I will start this blog with a small series of posts that describe changes to the architecture of Windows Server 2008 that are relevant to Terminal Services. Dynamic Kernel Address Space The number of users a Terminal Server can host is in most cases limited by the amount of free kernel memory, especially the free memory in the following areas: