Installation and Technical Issues

[ccarl]

I should've mentioned beforehand that I do have Riverbed WAN accelerators at all my locations so my latencies for large files is reduced to pretty much nothing.  Add in on-the-fly compression and I am guessing the EasyPrint times for me are drastically reduced but I haven't looked at the actual stats for printing via EasyPrint on the Riverbeds - will take a look and see what comes up on the monitoring.  On the other hand, a lot of the bandwidth is QoS'd for VOIP as well as file sharing too.

Personally, I would give it a try nevertheless to see how "bad" it is over straight T1.  Oh when I mentioned the 30-45 sec delay that was printing from Hawaii from our NJ server which is our worst case scenario for data transmissions.  After running a few latency tests from Seattle, 15-20 seconds is average for them.

[Ralph]

Well, in case anyone is interested, I had a couple users across our T1 WAN link test Windows 2008 TS Easy Print for me this morning.   They are heavy users printing sales orders, pick lists, pack lists, BOLs, and invoices.  I didn't tell them anything about my expectaion that print speeds would be slower.

They made it through lunch, and sure enough, I got a call.   "Something is definitely wrong with the printing.  It's so slow!"     Oh well, I gave it a shot.  Looks like I am stuck with the standard TS printer redirection method.  It's a bit of a pain making sure all the proper matching print drivers are installed on the TS, not to mention the risks involved with installing a boatload of various print drivers.  But at least printing is fast with the old-fashioned method.

Easy Print is a great concept, it's just not viable for our WAN implementation.

[Ralph]

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Ralph wrote:

The security benefit you mention would not really help me though.  I have a Windows Active Directory Organizational Unit set up that I simply move my Terminal Servers into which locks them down so users can't hurt anything on the TS while logged-in to their remote desktop profiles.

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Well whadaya know?  It appears that Microsoft has left out several Group Policy settings that would be needed in order to fully lock down a Win 2008 Terminal Server the way that a Win 2003 TS can be locked down.  Some new options/features in Win 2008 simply cannot be turned off using Group Policy.  Not good. 

[ccarl]

What specific settings are you trying to lock down?  I do have another application that isn't RemoteApp compatible so I setup a 2008 TS server with login that I locked down pretty good.

[Ralph]

Thanks for the reply, ccarl.

On the right-click menu I'd like to remove 'Open file location,' 'Run as admin,' and 'Restore previous versions.'  I haven't fully tested what, if anything, can be done with the latter two.  I do know that if a user tries to launch an executable using 'Run as admin,' the executable does run, although I doubt it's actually running with admin privs.  I would sure hope not anyway!
I also want to remove the 'Search' field from the start menu and from the top right of the 'Computer' window.  And finally, also in the 'Computer' window, I want to remove the 'Organize' button because it allows users to turn on the 'Navigation Pane' which then gives access to network shares.