rds

RDS – Fix broken local RDS links in start menu

RDS – Fix broken local RDS links in start menu

RemoteApp and Desktop Connections are quite powerful. Still, it happens that RDS icons configured through your Windows Remote Desktop Application broker either won’t update or vanish. This can have various reasons. Out of experience, the easiest way is to manually clean up and then configure the source again – as explained step by step below…

  1. Open REGEDIT as the current user (DO NOT run as!)
    1. Navigate to:
      1. Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Workspaces
    2. Delete the whole key WORKSPACES (just delete it! no worries)
  2. In Windows Explorer
    1. Navigate to:
      1. %appdata%\Microsoft\Workspaces
      2. Delete the whole WORKSPACES folder (yes – delete it!)
    2. Navigate to:
      1. %appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs
      2. If there is a folder “RDS Farm Name (RADC)” then delete it completely
  3. (see footer note) Open Control Pannel
    1. Navigate to “RemoteApp and Desktop Connections” or type in search box: remote
    2. There should be nothing in the connections, add a new one while clicking on “Access RemoteApp and desktops” in the left hand menu
      1. use your RDS URL
    3. If asked for credentials, use the users credentials or have them type em in
    4. This should finish successfully
  4. You now should see the applications in the start menu again

Note: If you have a GPO or script configured to auto-configure the Control-Panel, you could just reboot as well instead of manually configuring the Control Panel again.

Monitor the total amount of sessions on your RDS farm

ins a website from a systems administrator for systems administrators Home IT-Admins CMDB IT-Admins tool IT Search EOL Solutions Blog Contact Links Monitor the total amount of sessions on your RDS farm

This script is designed for PRTG and will allow you to go through all your RDS hosts and result back the total amount of sessions and active sessions.

You have various options as server name source, see the parameter section on top of the script.

This was also posted here: https://kb.paessler.com/en/topic/83151-total-user-count-rds-windows-2016

Please note that I grabbed the original script and re-wrote it completely, adjust some issues I encountered and tried to make it as variable as possible.

 

Script to remove RemoteApp and Desktop Connections

Script to remove RemoteApp and Desktop Connections

RADC or RemoteApp and Desktop Connections are very powerful in combination with Windows 7 or newer. You actually can have Terminalserver or RDS / Remote Desktop Server applications in the users start menu and connect to them in seamless window applications.

Windows 7 made it challenging to even implement those applications in a large scale, for this sole purpose you had to use a PowerShell script that actually imported a WCX file. Windows 8 and especially Windows 10 can do this via GPO nowadays.

The GPO settings allow one RDS farm to be added and they of course will remove the RDS farm if the GPO is changed/removed.

But what about those Windows 7 clients that are still out there and those cases where you actually have other RDS / RADC connections that you want to delete, e.g. manually created ones. I just came across this scenario and wanted to share the script I just wrote. I created two files in order to executed it simply via GPO as a Cscsript in order to avoid any dialog boxes coming up.

The .CMD executes the .VBS an expects it in the same directory of course. In the .VBS you will need to change the 5th line – as inidicated. Everything else you can leave as is. Of course this script will only delete the specified connection. You could define the line 5 parameter and change line 33 from

to the following line

This would result in to deleted everything but the defined connection and therefor do a cleanup. In theory you could then put a empty string in line 5 and just clean up everything.

As always, I hope some of you find this helpful.