Terminals: A Quick Look

Last summer I discovered Royal TS, a slick utility to manage multiple Remote Desktop connections to multiple machines. Ever since then it has been been almost a daily player in my typical day’s toolbox.

Somewhere along the line I also learned about Terminals which, at first glance, appears pretty similar to Royal TS in an ugly step-brother sort of way… In fact I’ll admit that the first couple times I “re” discovered it I would download it, run it, say “ugh” and move on.

This week, however, I decided to give it a longer look. While there are some rough edges, it turns out this thing is very handy to have around. In fact, it might just replace Royal TS for me… I’m liking it that much.

From the site:

Terminals is a secure, multi tab terminal services/remote desktop client. […]The project started from the need of controlling multiple connections simultaneously. It is a complete replacement for the mstsc.exe (Terminal Services) client.

But that’s not all. It does quite a bit more

Ping, Trace Route, WMI Explorer, TCP Connections, Network Interfaces, Whois, DNS Lookups, CPU History Graph, Shares List, Time Syncronization, Packet Capturing, Terminal Services Administration (tsadmin) etc…

Stored sessions can be Remote Desktop (RDP), VNC, VMRC, SSH, telnet, HTTP and probably more that I can’t recall at the moment. Seriously, this is like a swiss army knife for admins.

So far I have RDP (remote desktop) sessions stored for all my servers. I have HTTP sessions stored for all the web-based management stuff (firewalls, managed switches, etc.). I have a telnet session stored for my VPN concentrator and SSH sessions for a handful of *nix servers. A bunch of HTTPS sessions for iLO 2 which I use for my production HP servers. Oh, and more HTTP sessions stored for assorted wikis and other internal tools like ntop and WhatsUp monitoring.

Everything is organized via tags and easy to find.

There’s even a screen grab facility of some sort that I haven’t quite figured out yet. Heck, it appears to have some flickr hooks too.

Verdict

I’m in love. All my tools in one place. Nice tabbed metaphor and it all minimizes down to the tray when not in use.

Here’s a little snip of my current session:

For this show I just have two tabs/sessions open – one with the ntop web interface and the other as a telnet session to a Cisco VPN concentrator. (normally all my tabs are RDP…). To the left you can see the tag bar that organizes my stored sessions.

Downsides?

It’s not all roses, however. For instance, there are some odd and annoying case-sensitive challenges with the tags. I’ve manually edited my config file a couple times, but it keeps transforming ‘em back. Much to my chagrin.

For instance, referring to the picture above, “Prod – Ef Viawest” was originally entered as “Prod – EF ViaWest.” It seems to hate two capital letters in a row. For now I’ll use simpler tags and avoid the issue.

The VNC support is rather dated. I use UltraVNC and its associated domain based authentication. Unfortunately there’s no support for that. Seriously, that’s a bit of a heartbreaker when everything else is bundled so nicely.

Earlier this week I had some stability issues. But the past two days I haven’t… something to keep in mind and keep me nervous.

And finally, while not really a downside, the UI is definitely aimed more at function over form. Mostly. The tags bar, for instance, is a simple tree control. Sure it works, but it could probably be jazzed up a bit. I guess I’m used to Royal TS and its much more “polished” UI.

Some would argue it is silly to run web pages through this thing and at times I might even agree. But the functionality of bundling all similar tasks together does help rationalize it. It appears to use the IE rendering engine though which works fine for most things but is a little dodgy with the wiki (Google Sites).

I’m trying to sort out grabbing source to see if I can use my meager skills to contribute anything. CodePlex doesn’t seem to make it easy on an old guy…

Possibly Related posts:

1. More on Remote Desktop: Royal TS
2. Admin Tool: mRemote
3. Remote Desktop: No Console from Vista?
4. Windows 2003 Remote Desktop to Console
5. Nesting Remote Desktop Connections