Monday, May 3, 2010

Tools: Terminals

On many customer sites I use my own notebook to start a RDP session to the SCOM (R2) Management Servers. But with the years going by the amount of customers has grown and the size of the Management Groups as well.

So how to keep track of it all? Every company has a user account and password policy in place. So I end up with a whole collection of accounts, passwords and server names. So just starting a RDP session from the start menu won’t suffice any more.

Gladly there are some great solutions to be found on the internet. Some require money to be paid, others only ask for a donation. And to be frankly, when software is great, I do not mind paying for it.

For sometime now I use Terminals which is a great tool.

Why? Some reasons:

  • It has a password manager onboard, so no more hassle with remember usernames and passwords.
  • The program is password protected by default, which is a REQUIREMENT.
  • The capability to tag any new connection is great. So many connections can be added from different sites without losing control.
  • The possibility to add a description per server name is really great: with a single glance I know exactly what server does what.
  • All sessions opened in Terminals are displayed in a tab of its own. So switching between sessions is really easy!
  • All the possibilities available in RDP are to be found in Terminals as well:
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  • Besides RDP there are also many other connectivity options available, like:
    image

It works really great and cannot imagine my personal IT toolbox without it anymore.

Want to download it yourself? Go here.
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I use the 1.8c version since that is the latest stable release.

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