Enterprise Tools – Terminals 1.7
Any Enterprise Wide IT professional will have a full list of tools and utilities which they find invaluable. Some of these are paid for – some of which are free and open source. This is true regardless of which marketplace you work in – from the Oil and Gas Industries to Education or even the Military.
In the real world not the exam world – we have short timescales and we have to get the job done.
Sometimes you might spot a colleague using something on their screen and think Wow – that’s cool I can use that. Over the next few weeks I am going to go through my list of top utilities that I personally use and find invaluable. Of course – this is an ongoing list but I just want to share it with you.
I work mostly in the SharePoint / Biztalk Arena and that invariably means I am logging on to a terminal service window on to a server elsewhere. RDP is the most used tool in my toolbox. But sometimes it just doesn’t go far enough. I might need to telnet to a sessions, or VPN somewhere else. Inevitably these opening up a host of different clients to manage my needs.
One of the few products which is a staple diet of what I use day in day out – is a fantastic and FREE remote desktop client called Terminals.
Figure 1.1 Terminals New Connection Screen
Yes you can create a treeview of your current connections using standard Remote Desktop – but so much better using Terminals. For instance Terminals uses a tab based interface. In any large scare multiple datacentre, scalable environment you have tens of servers. All with different requirements. Some might be windows based, some maybe access via telnet. What I find is that I want a single point of entry to all these. Previously I had a little folder on my desktop with links to RDP, Telnet sessions, VPN. Now – Just have one link and it is all manageable from within there.
Figure 1.2 Terminals Telnet Sessions
With Terminals you can connect to the following connection
- RDP – Microsoft’s Remote Desktop aka Terminal Services
- Telnet – Telecommunication Network
- VNC – Virtual Network Computing
- VMRC – Virtual Machine Remote Control
- RAS – Remote Access Service (VPN and Dialup)
- ICA Citrix – Independent Computing Architecture
- SSH – Secure Shell
Further to this Terminals can
- Screen Capture any terminal screen
- The ability to Tagging connections (grouping)
- The ability to create Shortcuts (to external tools)
- To able to create Favourites
- Ability to import files such as MuRD and RDP files.
- Execute before connect
- Full Screen mode, multiple screen sizes / colour depths are supported
- Minimize to tray
- It has a secure password storage (other reuses of your PC cant get in on those times when someone needs to use your PC – or if your pc is stolen)
- Suite of network tools (basic ICMP tools, port scanner, packet sniffer).
Terminals 1.7 is available from CodePlex at http://www.codeplex.com/terminals Please support this great product.