Part 1

• Show you how to setup remote desktop services on a single server
• I will also show you how to setup a licensing server.
• We will setup a second server and configure and configure the Connection broker. The connection broker allows for Load Balancing.

Part 2

• I will cover how to install RemoteApp
• install a RemoteApp Application

Part 3

• I will cover Configuring Remote Desktop Gateway

Part 1

We will be installing the Remote Desktop Connection broker role. It provides:

• Load balancing sessions between multiple hosts
• Allows users to re-connect to an existing session
• Integrates with RD Virtualization Host servers for VDI.

First click on “Add Roles” in Server Administrator

Since this is the first server and we are planning to eventually have two RDS servers we will install the base role “Remote Desktop Session Host”. Because This will also be eventually the connection broker as well I will install it as well at the same time. The second server that get’s installed will not need the connection broker.

You will want to take notice of this. Any apps you may have already installed on the server might not work with Remote Desktop services. It’s a best practice to NEVER install apps on the server before installing Remote Desktop Services.

This is similar to what you see when you connect to Windows Vista/7/2008 box via remote desktop.

It will ask you what kind of Cals you have purchased. For this post I will be using a 120 day trial.

Enter users that you want to have access to this. By default Administrators are added by default.

There are some advance items that you get with 2008R2. Some of these items can cause a bigger strain on your host as well as your network bandwidth. Please read to see if you really need these items. I will leave them unchecked.

Installing the RDS role you will notice a few things will be enabled and a few things will be disabled depending on what you selected in the setup Wizard.

Hitting next will install RDS on the server. The install normally take around 5 minutes to go through. After it is done installing the RDS role your machine will need a reboot.

After a restart you will now see that you have a few extra MMC tools in the start menu-Administration Tools – Remote Desktop Services.

Open “Remote Desktop Session Hosts Configuration”. It’s a good idea to get familiar with the settings. Most people will go with defaults. These are going to be general settings that can be over ridden later by individual users.

One tab you might want to change in order to help with support is:

One thing you should not change is the security section. Microsoft RECOMMENDS that you DO NOT touch this tab. If you need to give users RDS access you should use the Group that is made at the time of installation. Here’s the recommendation directly from Microsoft.

Next we will activate and install the licensing server. In server manager under Remote Desktop Services click on Remote Desktop Licensing. Click “Add Role Services” link on the right hand side.

Again select “Remote Desktop Licensing” and click NEXT.

Configure the scope. I almost always choose forest.

Hit NEXT and then Install.

Now that you’ve installed RD Licensing Server you can Go to the START menu and open up RD Licensing Manager. Once open right click “RDS” and select Activate Server.

Hit NEXT on the first screen. On the next I almost always select “Automatic connection”. Make sure you have an internet connection before trying this.

You should see something similar:

Fill out your information.

You will see the server getting activated.

Hit next and next. Select your License program:

Enter your License code and hit Add…

The next few screens I can’t show you but it’s really just a next, next next.  Once check your RD Licensing monitor Manager. There should be a little green check on the RDS server now.

Now that you have setup one server for RDS you will need to setup a second server. Please follow the same steps for the second server.

** The second server will only have the RD Session Host services role installed **

RDS – Configuring Load Balancing and setting up Desktop Connection Broker

First of I should explain what the connection broker is. The RD connection broker is a role service included with RDS. It provides you with:

• Load Balances between session between multiple session hosts
• Allows users to reconnect to an existing session
• Integrates with RD Virtualization Host servers for VDI

The number one issue people have is that once they install the connection broker they forget that they need to add the computer to the Session Broker Computers group. The first server I installed RDS to is actually called RDS. The second server RDS server on my network called RDS2. Because The connection broker is installed on the first machine “RDS” I will go into the server manager on RDS. In server Manager go to “Configuration”-“Local Users and Groups”-“Session Broker computers” and add all the session host computers that you would like to add to your RD Connection farm.

Make sure that both RDS servers (RDS & RDS2) are added to the “Session Broker Computers” Group.

Add the servers and hit apply. Open Remote Desktop Session Host Configuration

Down the page in the Remote Desktop Session Host Configuration manager you will see a section that says:

In order to setup Load balancing this needs to say “YES”. Double click “Member of farm in RD Connection Broker”. A new window will open. The RD Connection Broker tab should be automatically selected. In the window that opens you will notice almost everything is greyed out. You will need to click on “Change Settings…” button in order to make changes in this window.

A new window will open. Because you are creating a RD Farm you want both servers setup the same way. You will select Farm Member, Enter the name of the RD connection broker (RDS) and the name you want to give the farm. Just make sure that all other RD Hosts use the exact same name. The name is case-sensitive I believe. Hit “OK”

The windows that was greyed out before should now look similar. I told the setup that I want to participate in load-balancing. If you used “100” on each server, both servers would have equal weight. 100 does not mean 100%. The number is relative to the other numbers set to the other hosts. Hit’s OK.

… More to come…

Well it turns out the phone can sync multiple calendars from Google.

So here’s the deal:

1. Make sure you’ve setup your Windows 7 phone with your Google email acccount. Make sure it has synced completely.
2. Go to http://m.google.com/sync
3. Log in with your gmail username and password
4. You should see at least one device. ie. Windows 7 phone
5. Enable all the calendars that you would like to have synced on your phone.
6. Save your preferences

NOTE -If people have shared calendars with you as well, you can actually select these calendars as well.

I hope this saved you some time.

First I will explain what I used to get things working. I am using 3 machines for this “How to” and I will refer to them in this way:

• DC – Has Hyper-V Manager installed. Running AD
• HYPERV – The actual Hyper-V Server. Part of the Domain configured on DC.
• centOS – Hyper-V Linux Guest

You will need to download a few things:

• centOS ISO
• Linux Integration Components – Linux.IC.v3.2.iso
• On HYPERV I create a folder C:\iso and put copy both of the ISO files here.

Step by step how I installed CentOS on Hyper-V with Networking.

On DC open Hyper-V Manager. Create a new virtual machine.

Name the Virtual Machine. hit Next.

Enter the amount of ram you want to give the centOS guest machine.

Make sure to tell the Virtual Machine what Hyper-V Network to use.

I just took all the defaults.

Tell Hyper-V Manager to use an ISO file. C:\iso\CentOS-6.2-x86_64-bin-DVD1.iso

Hit next and finish

Right Click the centOS Guest and click START. When the VM starts click “Install or Upgrade…”

I would recommend that you hit ok to test the media. I’ve already done this so I will hit “Skip”.

Hit Ok

Hit Ok

Hit Ok

“Re-initialize all”.

Select your UTC.

Enter your password.

Use the defaults

Write changes to disk

Twiddle your thumbs and grab a coffee. This will take a few minutes.

Yay! You should be done now. REBOOT!

When the centOS machine reboot login with root and password you entered during the setup.

On DC in Hyper-V Manager we need to load the Linux Integrated components ISO in the virtual Machine.

Once you have applied the new ISO go back to the centOS VM. You will need to start typing a bunch of commands. If we were to take the PDF seriously and type in the commands as is you will get the error message:

ls: cannot access kmod-hyper-v-rhel6-43.1.x86_64.rpm: no such file or directory
ls: cannot access hyper-v-rhel6-43.1.x86_64.rpm: no such file or directory
RPM’s are missing

Wow that is a mouthful! So instead of wasting your time let’s not follow the PDF and do it correctly from the beginning. I’m going to explain the screenshot first so you can understand what is happening.

We’re going to mount the CD inside centOS. We then need to copy the files from the CD and then run the Linux Integration components installer. There are 5 command you will have to enter. The last command starts with a “.” just encase you didn’t see that.

You should see a bunch of things being installed. When done it will ask you to reboot your machine.

Here’s the command to reboot. When the machine boots please login as root.

Congrats. You now have the Linux Integration components installed. You can verify that they are by looking at the Hyper-V manager. If the tools tell you the heartbeat is “OK” you know you’ve successfully completed all the steps up till now. You should also be able to click inside the virtual machine without doing a dance and you can hit power on the Hyper-V tools and the VM should power down nicely.

Yippy! Actually not really. Our VM on reboot will not have a NIC. We first will need to right click the centOS VM and write down the MAC address Hyper-V gave the centOS VM.

We will now need to make a bunch of changes to some centOS config files. Very fun!

Press i Key on keyboard and type the below lines. Please notice I used the MAC address from the screen shot a few lines up

To save the file hit: “ESC” then “SHIFT + :” and then type “wq” and hit ENTER.

We will need to edit another file.

Again you’ll want to hit “I” to insert some info.

To save the file hit: “ESC” then “SHIFT + :” and then type “wq” and hit ENTER.

You will now need to bring up the network card (ifup eth01 command) and then verify that it got an IP address (ifconfig command)

The first thing I would do to test the NIC and it’s stability is by updating the box with all the updates. To do this we will use the yum command.

After all the updates get applied. Force the machine to reboot. Double check all the updates got applied. Hopefully I saved you a few hours of mindless searches

Well it turns out it isn’t an Excel issue and rather a Windows issue! You might find my “Can’t change the default printer in Windows” post to be helpful in solving this issue. Hopefully after you follow those steps you can get rid of the “Can’t select printer in Excel” issue.

The first step you should use to troubleshoot why you can’t change the default printer in Windows is to log in as another user which is an administrator of the computer. Once logged in try and see if you can switch printers now. In all my time looking at these issues I have almost always found that the reason why you can’t change the default printer is your profile has become corrupt.

If you can’t change the printer under another user it could still mean that your profile is corrupt but it also could mean you’ve installed a printer driver that is too old for you OS and it’s causing havoc on your system.

The only resolution I have found is to delete the account and restore the data back into a newly created account.

Here’s the steps below how I fixed “Can’t change the default printer in Windows”.

• Take a backup of user account.
• Then log in as Administrator.
• Right-click on Computer and then select Properties.
• In the Properties window, select Advanced System Settings.
• Then select Advanced tab. Here, you click on Settings under User Profiles.
• Then select the profile and delete it.
• Then, log in as a broken user and then try to restore the files from backup, except ntuser.dat, Ntuser.dat.log and Ntuser.ini, if required.

Each time I’ve seen this happen it’s normally after a machine has had a virus

I’ve created a FREE Vintage and Retro Photoshop Action for Photoshop. I made this in Photoshop CS5 but it should be backwards compatible.

Here’s the steps of the actions:

1. Duplicate original layer. Change layer Blend to Softlight
2. Create new Color layer. Apply color: 070142. Change layer Blend to exclusion
3. Create new “level” adjustment layer. Set to  ”11 – 1 -255″
4. Create new Solid color – de9b82 -Change layer Blend to softlight. Change opacity to 75%
5. Create new Solid Color layer – fed1eb – Change layer Blend to softlight – opacity 50%
6. Create new Solid Color layer – 070044 – Change layer Blend to exclusion
7. duplicate original layer – to top and blend as softlight.

Just to make things even simpler I am offering a free download of the FREE Vintage and Retro Photoshop Action here.

Quite often, one of the relationships you depend on the most is neglected. Through thick and thin, good times and bad, sickness and health, this “significant other” is there for you when you need them. Like all strong partnerships, a little effort goes a long way, especially when it comes to your vehicle. This Valentine’s Day, the Ford Motor Company of Canada, Limited is reminding Canadians the importance of showing their vehicle tender love and care to ensure a happy, healthy, and long-lasting relationship.

Keep the wheels of love turning:

1. Be sure to give wheels and tires the attention they deserve.
2. Check your tire pressure regularly. Low pressure can result in poor fuel economy, handling, and comfort.
3. It’s all about balance. Having tires balanced and properly aligned ensures they last longer. It is also good to have tires rotated every 8,000 km to preserve their tread. The climate of your relationship is bound to change, much like the changing of the seasons. Tires should match the season you’re driving in. Remember, winter tires work best in cold winter conditions.

Keep that engine humming:

1. Properly caring for your engine will help make sure it gets turned on every time.
2. Check your engine oil level frequently. If the level is too high or too low, it can cause problems. Regular oil and filter changes are also very important in maintaining a healthy engine.
3. Remember to replace your timing belt in accordance with your vehicle manufacturer’s recommendations. Generally, it should be replaced about every 100,000 km.
4. Prevent overheating by checking coolant levels often. A cooling system flush and refill should be scheduled every 80,000 to 100,000 km.

Love that body.

1. Keeping the exterior of your car clean should not be underestimated when it comes to your vehicle maintenance checklist.
2. Prevent damaging rust by repairing paint chips and dents as soon as they happen. Wash and wax your vehicle regularly to prevent paint from fading and dulling.

Enlist a third party if necessary.

1. Even the strongest relationships require a little help from time to time. Relationship counsellors and mechanics are one and the same. If things don’t feel right, don’t try and ride it out.
2. Take your vehicle to your dealership on a regular basis to make sure things are running smoothly. Ford mechanics are factory-trained experts and can mediate and help solve any situation you may encounter with your vehicle.

Looking for a new partner to own the road with? Here are some qualities you should keep in mind:

1. Communication is key: Open lines of communication in relationships are of the utmost importance. The latest SYNC technology from Ford, will help you focus on the drive while keeping the lines of communication open with hands-free calling, audible text messaging and voice activated music to ensure driving safety, and satisfaction.
2. Unwavering trust and loyalty: Ford offers the latest in convenience technologies, making it easy to trust your vehicle. The Terrain Management System optimizes driveability and comfort as well as maximizing traction and Active park assist will help you get into those tricky parking spaces.

For further information:

For news releases, related materials and high-resolution photos and video, visit www.media.ford.com. Follow at www.facebook.com/ford, www.twitter.com/FordCanada  or www.youtube.com/fordvideo1.

If you want to learn more about flash photography I would recommend buying his course.

After everything in your photo has been corrected you will want to place all the items into their own group. I typically call them “Enhancement”.

In Windows I hit “CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E” to make a new layer that a is the equivalent of all the layers merged into one.

While the top layer is selected you will want to click on “Filter-OTHER-High Pass…”

You will get a “High Pass” dialogue box pop up. Play with the radius. What’s nice about this technique is that it is better to add too much then too little. Click “OK” to apply the “high pass”.

Now hit “CTRL+SHIFT+U” to de-saturate the layer. This will make sure that the picture is only grey colors.

Now this is where things get interesting.

Make sure the top “high pass” layer is selected. You will need to apply a blend mode to the entire layer. I find “Soft light” produces the best results.

Now if the image is too sharp you can use the opacity of the layer to “decrease” the amount of sharpening by dialing it in to however you like.

The second way:

is by using the same key combo to merge all the layers up to the top later (CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E").

Turning the layer into a smart layer and then applying unsharp mask. Using the dials you can change the sharpening at any time.

Make the changes as needed.

Again since this is on it’s own later you can finely control the amount of sharpening either by the filter controls or through the opacity.

NOTE: If you reach the maximum number of saved files, the system automatically deletes the oldest files to make room for the new saved project. Otherwise, you can free space by manually deleting saved files before you save additional copies of your project.

To Back Up Your website

1. Log in to your WebSite Tonight account.
2. From the Manage menu, select Backup/Restore. The Backup and Restore page displays.
3. In the Enter a name for this copy field, specify the name for the backup file.
4. Click Save website.

To Restore a Backup Copy of Your website

1. Log in to your WebSite Tonight account.
2. From the Manage menu, select Backup/Restore.
3. In the Restore a Previous Project area, click the Restore button for the project you want to restore. The Restore button is located in the Restore column of the list.
4. To make a backup copy of your current website before restoring the saved copy, click OK. WebSite Tonight restores the saved copy of your project.

NOTE: WebSite Tonight also creates two (2)auto-backups that are created during template changes and three (3) pre-publish backups.