If you would like to read the other parts in this article series please go to:
Throughout this article series, I have taken the time to show you numerous scripting techniques. Since a lot of administrators are not well-versed in scripting, I wanted to take the time to explain a lot of the basics rather than just jumping right into the terminal service related stuff. I really appreciate everyone’s patience as the series has progressed, but now I finally feel as though I’ve covered enough ground that we can actually begin to do something useful.
That being said, I want to take some of the techniques that I have covered in this article series, and show you how to use those techniques to build a session management script. Later on in the series, I am going to show you a technique for creating nested menus, and we are going to join our session management script to a collection of other scripts.
Session Management
If you go back to the beginning of this article series, you will recall that I showed you a number of different commands that were related to viewing or managing terminal server sessions from the command line. I do not want to repeat the full syntax of these commands, because I have already covered the syntax earlier in this series, but I do want to briefly mention the session management related commands that are available to you:
Query Session – Displays information about the sessions that are running on the terminal server
Reset Session – Resets a specific session to a known state
TSCON – Attaches a user to an existing session
TSDISCON – Disconnects a client from a specific terminal server session.
Change Logon – Allows you to enable or to disable the user’s ability to log onto the terminal server.
Now that I have refreshed everyone’s memory as to which commands are available, the first project that I want to take on is to create a script based on these commands.
As you can imagine, there are a lot of different ways that I could approach this type of script. The first thing that I want to do though is to create some code that allows administrators to know which terminal server they are working with, and to switch servers if necessary. After all, some of the commands that I mentioned a moment ago are server specific, and we really don’t want to be locked into using one specific server all the time.
With that in mind, let’s start out by adapting the menu that we created in the previous article to the task at hand. If you look at the sample code below, you will see that it is basically the same as what we have already covered, I have just gotten rid of some menu choices, and added a choice for selecting a different server. The code is not really functional yet, I just want to use this as a starting point.
@echo off
set _menu=D
:Loop
cls
Echo What do you want to do?
Echo A: Select a Different Terminal Server
Echo B: This choice is not yet available
Echo C: This choice is not yet available
Echo.
Echo D: Quit
Echo.
Set /P _menu=Please enter your choice:
if not “%_menu%”==”” set _menu=%_menu:~0,1%
REM echo %_menu%
If /i “%_menu%”==”A” goto sub_server
If /i “%_menu%”==”B” goto sub_nothing
If /i “%_menu%”==”C” goto sub_nothing
if /I “%_menu%”==”D” goto:eof
goto:loop
:sub_server
echo This subroutine allows you to choose a different server
@Echo Off
goto:eof
:sub_nothing
echo Reserved for future code
goto:eof
As I mentioned earlier, some of the session related commands are server specific. The way the command’s syntax work, you do not have to specify a server, but if you do not specify a server then Windows will assume that you want to run the command against the current server. That being the case, there are two things that we are going to need to do.
First, we have to assign a default server choice. The reason for this is that if we are going to design the script in a way that allows it to perform actions against multiple terminal servers, then the script is going to have to include a variable that contains the server name. We have to initialize this variable just in case the administrator forgets (or doesn’t want to take the time) to select a server.
The other thing that we have to do is to provide the administrator with some sort of mechanism for connecting to a different server.
Let’s tackle the server variable first. For the purposes of this article, we will just call the variable _SRV. If you look at the second line of the block of code above, you can see that we are already initializing one variable, and using it to assign a default menu choice. We can use this exact same technique to assign a default server. For example, in my organization I want the script to apply to a server named Mirage by default. Therefore, I would add the following command to the script:
Set _SRV=Mirage
I tend to think that just specifying a default server really isn’t enough though. In a large organization it can be difficult to remember which server you are attached to. Therefore, it seems prudent to add a command to the script that tells the administrator which server they are presently attached to. Therefore, I will add the following command to the menu loop:
Echo The currently selected terminal server is %_SRV%
You can see what this looks like in the code block below:
@echo off
set _menu=D
set _SRV=Mirage
:Loop
cls
Echo What do you want to do?
Echo A: Select a Different Terminal Server
Echo B: This choice is not yet available
Echo C: This choice is not yet available
Echo.
Echo D: Quit
Echo.
Echo The currently selected terminal server is %_SRV%
Echo.
Set /P _menu=Please enter your choice:
if not “%_menu%”==”” set _menu=%_menu:~0,1%
REM echo %_menu%
If /i “%_menu%”==”A” goto sub_server
If /i “%_menu%”==”B” goto sub_nothing
If /i “%_menu%”==”C” goto sub_nothing
if /I “%_menu%”==”D” goto:eof
goto:loop
:sub_server
echo This subroutine allows you to choose a different server
@Echo Off
goto:eof
:sub_nothing
echo Reserved for future code
goto:eof
When we execute the script, it looks like what you see in Figure A. As you can see in the figure, the script displays the currently selected terminal server, just beneath the menu. The option to select a different terminal server doesn’t actually do anything yet, but we will write the code for that function in Part 12.
Figure A: The script now displays the currently selected terminal server
Conclusion
In this article, I began constructing a script that will eventually allow you to manage terminals server sessions from a command prompt. After writing this article I realized that I have gotten ahead of myself. In Part 10, we began creating a script that would allow you to create, view, and print terminal service related log files. When I sat down to write this article, I was thinking that I had completed the previous script, but it later occurred to me that I promised to show you how to modify the previous script so that you can choose a specific report that you want to view or print.
In the next article in the series, I want to backtrack a bit and show you this technique. Not only is the technique necessary for selecting log files, but we will have to use the exact same technique in the script that we began constructing above, because the process of selecting a different terminal server relies on this technique.
If you would like to read the other parts in this article series please go to:
