Create Custom TSAC Web Consoles

In "Remotely Manage Your Win2K Servers," April 2001, you wrote about the Windows 2000 Server Terminal Services Advanced Client (TSAC) and the modifications you made to its accompanying manyservers.htm file. I want to use Terminal Services to make all of our organization's servers Web-manageable. I'd like to customize manyservers.htm to create custom TSAC Web consoles that provide direct connections to specific servers, without requiring me to type in the server name. Can you point me in the right direction?

A single-server console version of manyservers.htm sounded like an interesting and useful idea, so I tweaked the file to let you easily create a per-server auto-connect link for each of your servers. Listing 1 shows sample code that you can adapt to accomplish your task. In place of the MYSERVER variable at callout A, type the name of the appropriate server. You can create a custom .htm file for each server that you want to manage and substitute the appropriate server name in each file. (If you don't already have the TSAC client, you can download it from Microsoft's Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/downloads/recommended/tsac/tsac.asp.)

I tried out the code on my network and found that it worked well; Figure 1 shows the resulting TSAC Web console. Remember to substitute your server's name for MYSERVER in the code, and make one copy of the file—with a different server name—for each server you want to manage. Note that the sample code includes the commands to create Connect and Disconnect buttons so that you can connect to and disconnect from the related server through the TSAC Web console. Also, you can easily change the size of the TSAC client session. Simply edit the WIDTH and HEIGHT object attributes in Listing 1. For information about advanced TSAC scripting, I suggest you read the Microsoft article "Scripting the Terminal Services Advanced Client"(http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/techart/w2ktsac.htm).