Process & Procedures

How to access client drives under Terminal Services

Overview >> Procedures >> Additional Notes >>

Overview

With the introduction of Windows 2003 Terminal Services, accessing client and network drives has changed significantly.

Under MetaFrame, client drives would automatically map back to the server as the local C:\, D:\ & etc. thus providing an intuitive way of accessing files on your local PC. However, the side effect to this convenience is degraded performance. As a rule, you always want to limit the amount of information that must pass between the server and client so that your session will be more responsive. By consistently accessing files located on the client's local drives, you effectively increase the amount of information that must be transmitted between the client and server causing your session to slow down.

Under Windows 2003 Terminal Services, client drives DO NOT map back to physical drive letters accessible within the session. Instead, (when selected) they are presented as "(Drive Letter) on (Workstation Name)" which is viewable via the Windows Explorer interface or any Windows application that takes advantage of the standard file open/save dialog.

Below you will find the step-by-step instructions on how to access your client drives.
Please keep in mind how this will affect your performance and use it sparingly.

Procedures

1. Before connecting to a terminal session, make sure that your "Mappings Preference" in the Application Center has been set to include "Drives".
2. Once you have successfully connected and logged on to a Terminal Session, open Explorer from the Start Menu:
   
3. Expand the Tree Node for the server you are connected to:
   (In the following example, we called the Tree Node "SERVERNAME")
   
4. Locate the drive on your PC you wish to access in the form of "(Drive Letter) on (Client PC Name)":
   (In the following example, we will access the client's "S" drive which is a mapped drive on the local PC.)
   

Additional Notes

When accessing your local files, you will notice that you connected via "S on (Client PC Name)" and NOT via a network mapping as "S:\" on the Server. What this means is that you can not save or open files directly from S:\Docs (as shown in the example above). You can only connect via the UNC path.

Additional examples of this concept when connecting through a Terminal Server:

• C:\TEMP is NOT your local PC's temp directory.
  To access your temp directory through explorer, browse to "C on (Client PC Name) -> Temp"
• If in an application you specify to save a file to C:\TEMP, it WILL BE LOST.