Using URL Parameters With the New TSWeb

Several questions have been posted in the various client newsgroups lately about single-click connection to a Terminal Server through the new web client. Here's some background info.

• Yes, you CAN autoconnect. You need to use the "AutoConnect" parameter in the URL (covered below).
• There are 2 things you can control when you autoconnect: the server to which you are connecting, and whether or not you will be in fullscreen mode.
• The "fullscreen" setting is configured by setting a parameter in the URL named FS equal to something other than 0 or nothing.
• The server parameter is controlled by setting a parameter in the URL named Server equal to the IP address or name of the server. Note that if you are connecting over the Internet, this generally MUST be a fully qualified DNS name or public IP address.  Also, if the IP address or web address for the web server hosting the applet is the same as the one used for the TS system, you don't need to provide it.

BUILDING YOUR OWN CONNECTION STRING

I'm going to walk through building a URL string for people who haven't done it.

Here's how it works. Let's assume your webserver is web.our.biz and your terminal server is hydra.our.biz.

The base address to open a standard installed TSWeb page is going to be

http://web.our.biz/tsweb/default.htm

To do anything else, you have to specify some command line parameters in the address. You do this by putting a "?" at the end of the web page address, then adding things after that. IIS knows that the page is everything before the "?", and the stuff after gets handed to that page for work.

The first thing we want to do is make sure we autoconnect. So we add AutoConnect=1 to the URL after the "?", like this:

http://web.our.biz/tsweb/default.htm?AutoConnect=1

So far, so good. This page will try to autoconnect. Of course, since you didn't specify a server, it will try to start a TS session with web.our.biz, and we have to send it over to hydra.our.biz.

We do this by adding another parameter. This has to be separated from the first parameter, and that is always done with the "&". So we have to add both a "&" and then "Server=hydra.our.biz" to the URL.

This gives us the following - watch out, it may break across lines in the newsreader:

http://web.our.biz/tsweb/default.htm?AutoConnect=1&Server=hydra.our.biz

Finally, let's set it to go to Fullscreen on connect. We do that with the parameter "FS", which should not be 0 or missing (unless you want to say "I don't want fullscreen"). I just use 1 as the argument, since I always know a computer will always understand 1's and 0's. Again, this line may wrap in your newsreader:

http://web.our.biz/tsweb/default.htm?AutoConnect=1&Server=hydra.our.biz&FS=1

And that's it. Pass that out as a URL, and you have an autoconnect string that will do the following -

+ go to web.hydra.com to download the page and the latest version of the control,

and then

+ automatically try to start a connection to hydra.our.biz in fullscreen mode