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TS Plus
Débuté par JP, 18 avr. 2014 11:04 - 5 réponses
Posté le 18 avril 2014 - 11:04
Hi Al,

We are interested to try TS Plus and I have seen a few people comment on it here. Are there any tips, tricks, or things to watch out for that might make our experiments and investigations easier or more rewarding?

TIA
Posté le 18 avril 2014 - 11:23
Hi

Iam interssted in your findings. Please do post them if you have them

Regards
Posté le 18 avril 2014 - 13:18
Hi,
Works great here, although I had problems with my first setup ..
Somethings I learned:

1) Do your first TEST installation on a simple Windows 7 PRO machine.
Don't forget to install the IIs on this machine first.
This machine should have an INTERNAL FIXED ip.
And its better to have a STATIC ip from your internet provider.
And a lot better if your machine has ONLY ONE nic.

2) When installing, choose to use the TSPlus Web server (not IIS) and make it listen to port 85. Leave all other needed ports to whatever the install/setup says ...

3) The setup takes care of port opening on your machines firewall, but it doesn't hurt to check your firewall after installation.

4) Check your routers and your PROVIDER to make sure they don't block port 85.

5) If your static IP is say ss.ss.ss.ss and your machines INTERNAL FIXED ip is ii.ii.ii.ii, use port porwarding on your router. This should be:
ip: ss.ss.ss.ss , port 85
to ->
ip: ii.ii.ii.ii , port 85

6) Go on an make a user on this machine and add applications to this user.
You can do this from tsplus (after install)
Ignore everything TSPlus has for Domain (even on Win 2xxx SERVERs)
And don't try to use the portable client generator at this stage.
You will use a web browser instead (firefox works great)

7) Now you are ready to test.
If you are OUTSIDE your internal network, just use ss.ss.ss.ss:85 from a web browser.
If you are INSIDE your internal network sometimes ss.ss.ss.ss:85, doesn't work ....
It depends on your internal routing so just use ii.ii.ii.ii:85, this always works ....

8) Always try INTERNAL testing first.
If it doesn't work check to see that you can ping internally this machine and fix this issue.

9) Don't forget that your TSPlus users are actually your machines users.
So don't forget to give a (strong) password for ALL your Windows7 users, even if you haven't added applications to these users ....
Don't know why, but I had a user without a password, that I didn't add apps to him.
I was able to connect with this user (without a password) and getfull access to my machine !!!!

Steven Sitas
Posté le 18 avril 2014 - 13:23
and something else I forgot to say ...
If you are going to install TSPlus for your clients, ask TSPlus to become a Reseller.
You will get a good discount with no fuss

Steven Sitas
Posté le 18 avril 2014 - 16:03
Great info Steven, well thought out and useful answer. Thanks!
Posté le 18 avril 2014 - 16:28
Hi Allard,

OK, so I had a clean Windows 2008 R2 (64 bit) server handy for testing. I install the TSPlus on it and this went through very simple and straight forward.

Installation and Setup:

The TSPlus administrator front-end is quite straight forward. Although there are quite a few options they are logically arranged into 6 categories such as (1) Server settings (options for the back-end server, (2) Applications (options for which applications you want to expose to your users and for setting which users can access what), (3) Web settings (options for setting up the TSPlus built-in web server), (4) Security, (5) Gateway (options for managing a farm of servers for high user loads, and (6) Licensing options. I won’t go into each option as spending just 1 hour looking through them is quite enough to understand the basic idea and purpose of each option.

TSPlus web server vs. IIS or Apache:

TSPlus comes with its own web server (i.e. like IIS) which will install by default and hence handle web traffic but you can also use your own web server or the IIS which comes with Windows. What you choose depends on what your server is doing; if it will be dedicated to just TSPlus then I guess let TSPlus handle everything. If you need to share the server with websites or other HTTP(S) services then you will need to decide how to handle that. I choose to let TSPlus use its own web server and (NB: Tip 1) make sure IIS is turned OFF in order for the TSPlus to be able to handle the HTTP requests. If IIS is on then TSPlus will not work since IIS is catching all HTTP requests and not TSPlus. I am not sure how to use IIS instead of the TSPlus web server; you have to do something with changing the default port to 81 and then some sort of port forwarding but I did not experiment with this yet.

Publishing Apps:

Setting up which applications you wish to "publish" to users is simple; you just select the EXE files, set the folder locations for running them, and give them a name for the user to see. That is simple enough. Obviously the EXE files, i.e. your application, must handle being loaded by multiple users so that if your app creates/uses files then just keep in mind that multiple users will be loading the same app and thus accessing the same files. However, each user will be running in their own memory space just like with Remote Desktop / Terminal Services and hence they all get their own "C:\users\login_name" sub-folder and so forth.

User:

Basically you set up users on your server. You create them as normal using the Windows Management Interface for Users and Groups. Each user has a username, password, etc. You can then, via the TSPlus Administrator interface, choose which applications each user can access. Different users can be given access to different applications. Or you can choose to bulk set one or more applications for all users by default.

Setting up the default page for the web server:

You have to setup the "landing" page for your web server. The landing page is the page your users will navigate to with their browser and will ask for login details etc. This is done under tab 3 “Web” and using option Webmaster Toolkit. The dialog basically allows you to define a simple landing page for your server; this includes a title, some colours, some logos, a footer. You can also choose the wording, i.e. translations for your preferred language, for the various buttons and wording on the page. You can choose which types of devices can access your apps (desktop, iPad, etc.). It also allows you to define how your applications will appear to the user. There are several options such as a defined width/height or "seamless" which means within the browser window itself, colour depth, etc. You can choose whether HTML5, Java, or Windows can be offered to your user for loading your application. I tried seamless and HTML5 and that works all inside a browser tab. I guess one needs to experiment with these options to find what works best for one's purpose.

Accessing Published Apps:

OK, so here it gets interesting. You open a browser (I used FireFox) and you point it to your server. The landing page you "designed" above gets displayed. If you specified that a username+password must be entered then these are requested on the landing page. You choose how to login i.e. HTML5, Java, or Windows, and click Login. What happens next depends on a user interface setting you chose under the TSPlus Admin application. This determines how the application(s) you want to offer your users is presented. If you only offered one application then that application just loads – simple. If you offered multiple applications to your users then one option is a blank desktop with icons for each application you offer. Another option is a type of "taskbar" across the top or down the right side with buttons for each application. Another option is called the TSPlus floating bar which is a "toast" type float out/in mini-window with a button for each application you published for that user. Whatever method you use is a personal choice. The user clicks the button for the desired application and the application loads. In my case the application loaded inside the browser tab since I used HTML5 which means in the browser.

How does it look/feel:

My apps loaded inside the browser tab (HTML5 mode) and they look and feel exactly like they do when run locally except inside my browser. If you choose to run the application in "Windows" mode then your app will run outside of the browser and will appear on the users taskbar. However, this requires Java to be installed on the users machine. If a client does not want to install Java then you can just run your app using HTML5 mode and then it runs inside the browser itself. The application appears with its title bar, min/max buttons, etc. Just as when run normally locally.

Performance:

Of course there is a lag since what is happening is that the screen updates are being pumped from the server to the user and mouse+keyboard action is being pumped from the user to the server - so bandwidth is the bottleneck. If your server has sufficient bandwidth and the user has sufficient bandwidth then this lag will become small and possibly not even really noticeable. It also depends on how much screen activity your application creates – the more visually active your application is the more information that needs to be sent to the user. Otherwise, everything works exactly as if you were running the app locally. Obviously the servers resources are now going to be split amongst all the users that load your application(s). This means RAM and disk access will be shared. Therefore I think it is imperative to use a 64 bit version of Windows so the OS can access RAM above the 3GB limit, then add in lots of RAM e.g. 8Gb minimum, and then try and go for a fast hard disk or even a solid state drive.

I have not tested TSPlus with multiple users but I assume that since they have been around since 1997 that this works OK. I think multiple user access is going to be mainly dependent on the hardware capabilities and your bandwidth.

Windows Licensing and CALS:

This is interesting – apparently you do NOT need any Windows CALS and this is because it is all running as a website / web server which is not number of users dependent. That is quite cool.

Printing:

I have not tested this but TSPlus say printing and opening of external documents (e.g. XLS, DOC, PDF) all get re-directed to the end-users machine so the printing occurs locally and the document is opened on the client computer. This is also very cool but I did not test this yet.

Conclusion:

Looks like a very interesting product and definitely worth experimenting with. Will post more feedback if I find anything worth saying.

J