MailBag Friday (#19)

Every Friday, we dedicate this space to sharing solutions for some of the most frequently asked questions posed to our ThinManager Technical Support team.  This weekly feature will help educate ThinManager users and provide them with answers to questions they may have about licenses, installation, integration, deployment, upgrades, maintenance, and daily operation.  Great technical support is an essential part of the ThinManager platform, and we are constantly striving to make your environment as productive and efficient as possible.

 

What are the minimum requirements for WinTMC?

 

WinTMC is currently supported on Windows XP / Server 2003 and newer.  The minimum system requirements for those operating systems is all WinTMC requires.

550MHz processor

256MB memory

200MB of free HDD

-TM

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We have been converting some of our MultiMonitor display computers into thin clients. Our webpage was designed for Firefox and the problem is that we are essentially trying to run multiple instances of Firefox on the same machine under the same login which requires us to specify different profiles. This only works by manually select a profile whenever Firefox is opened so the MultiMonitor sessions wont open automatically since they are all the same. Is there any way around this? 

 

You could setup Firefox as a separate display client for each terminal\thinclient in ThinManager, have a different profile specified in the command line arguments, and remove the shortcut from the Terminal Server (for thoroughness).

Please see the below link for instructions on how to setup multiple profiles and details on the Firefox Command Line Options:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/internet/firefox/use-multiple-firefox-profiles-at-the-same-time/

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments

-TM

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I have a USB data logging device I would like to use with a thin client.  I have drivers for the device and will be installing the corresponding logging application on a terminal server.  Is there a recommended module that I can use to install the driver for the device via ThinManager firmware?

 

 

A USB doesnt map like serial, so when using a device that doesn’t work like a keyboard wedge but needs a driver you will need to use a “USB to IP box.”  You just install the drivers on the session then point to the IP and the USB ports map to the session.

See http://www.thinmanager.com/technotes/05_Hardware/USBandThinClients.pdf

-TM

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We have a dozen thin client terminals and a dozen users set up on each of our Terminal Servers.  Each thin client HMI session needs to have a default printer setup.  Since the clients are spread out around our facility, there are several printers involved.

Is there some “trick” that would allow me to easily setup the correct default printer?   We’re currently running Windows 2008 Server R2.   I’ve googled around on this topic, but I can’t find a solution.

 

You can set it in the registry which will keep you from having to visit each client .

Registry entries for printers: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/102966

Registry entry for the default printer for the current user: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/156212

-TM

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Tom Jordan

Marketing Lead for ThinManager - A Rockwell Automation Technology