working from home

[d1551]

:? I have been told by my Lords to provide all my teaching staff with access to log in to school network from home. i have bought a new server and installed windows 2003 enterprise edition on it and also have setup up erminal services on it. we have enough CAL licenses. what do i do next? how do i create the rdp that will be downloaded from our network by the eacher on their laptop for connectivity? how do i set it up so that whenever they log into the network, they will pick up thier profiles and allow them to see all thier mapped drives

[mrcrazy04]

Firstly you will have to see what the firewall settings on your internet connection are like, and whether or not they will open the relevant ports upstream (if you're with an RBC).
If you've set up Terminal Services, then I'm assuming you want the staff to logon to that for their remote access, so you would need to get the ports for that opened on the firewall, and then it would just be a case of teachers going into Start>All Programs>Accessories>Communications>Remote Desktop and entering the internet IP of the school.
However I don't think this allows for encrypted passwords, so they would be running unencrypted across the internet, which is not good for viewing confidential documents.

We had a VPN (using Windows IAS) for technicians, and WebDav for everyone else, so they could access their my documents folder through that.

[djm968]

The port required to be open in both directions for RDP is 3389 (TCP)

RDP connection settings are configured using the Terminal Services Configuration management console

I usually create a new OU for the TS Server and a new GPO using GPO loopback processing to enforce the lockdown policy on all users.

You don't want a user shutting the TS server down!

I would also create a new security group, for all your remote access users and configured permissions on the RDP connection to only allow this group to logon.

You mention CAL licenses, have you also obtained the required number of TS CAL's and configured and activated your licensing server?

If you run SIMS.Net install the WS components on the TS server for extra brownie points!