Anybody know terminal server?

[lee n. field]

Who knows, all I can do is ask:

A copy/paste from what I asked at Microsoft's support forum:

We have a new customer.  They use a vertical market app for which licensing is tied to both Windows user login and local computer name (ie. X user on Y computer is licensed).  The vendor of that app steered them to a Windows terminal server to allow them to use their app more flexibly.  This is a workgroup with a dozen or so scattered users, not a domain.

What the customer wants to do is have function specific logins, not user specific logins.  For example, they would not have a "Joe User" login, and Joe is the only one who ever normally uses that. Instead Accounting would have  logins A1, A2, A3, etc.  Someone who need to do an accounting task on their app would log in to the terminal server with one of these logins as available.

The problem we've run into is, if someone logs in to the terminal server using a userid that's already in use, the original user is disconnected, and the new user takes over without knowing he's disconnected the first guy.  There's no good way to tell if a login id is in use without checking the Remote Desktop Services Manager on the server, which isn't handy.

I've looked around, and this appears to be the normal, default behaviour.  The only way I can see around this is to uncheck "restrict each user to a single session" in host configuration.  The vendor of their app says not to do that, it will screw up their stuff.

What we want, is for the first user to have a lock on a session, so that noone else can use it until he logs out.

Can this be done?  If so, exactly how?  What am I missing?

This is Server '08.  Which has some cool capabilities, WRT Remote Desktop, in comparison to previous versions.

What I want the customer wants can't be done, right?

[41magsnub]

Yep, that is how it works.  The only way to do what you want is to disable the restrict user sessions setting.

I do a lot of terminal services in my networking gig with and without citrix.  Common usernames is asking for trouble in this environment IMHO (besides the obvious security issues).  It plays all kinds of fun games with applications (this depends on how they are written and where settings are stored) and printer assignments.

What that setting is really intended for is either the same person logging into multiple desktop sessions at the same time (I have a customer that does this), and for APP-V deployments where you are publishing applications instead of a desktop.  If you publish an app... say notepad and a user is running it, then that user wants to open the published calculator app from the same server that second session would take over the notepad instance unless this is disabled.