Terminal Services disable login - Load Balancing

[Rearview]

Complicated subject, I know...

We have Windows 2000 Terminal Services running on a few Win2k advanced servers. I have Network Load Balancing (NLB) running on them and all is well. If I disable logins on one machine to do maintinance or restart or something, when a user connects to the cluster address, it will stil point some of them to the server with logins disables and they get a message that they cannot log on.

Is there a way around this problem? If I want to disable logins on a server for a while I don't want to have to field calls from my users who get directed to that server by Windows NLB. Thanks,

 

[brontosaurus]

you can set terminal services to only answer on specific IP's. Would that help?

 

[Rearview]

Only answer on specific IPs? explain.

 

[brontosaurus]

If you go into Terminal Services Configuration, into the Properties of the RDP-Tcp connection, you can set which adapter will answer TS requests.

 

[Rearview]

I'm only using one adapter on each server. When I disable logons on a server, I just do not want the load balancing to direct clients to the server with logons disabled.

 

[brontosaurus]

ok, misunderstood your issue. How are clients connecting? can you use DNS to direct them?

 

[Rearview]

Maybe if we had a DNS server... Clients connevt via Microsoft RDP5 terminal services client. I set it to connect to the cluster's name, which I added as a static WINS entry.

I don't think Round Robin DNS would work, though, since the server might still be on, just have logons disabled. I would bet it would do the same thing.

I know with Citrix Metaframe when you disable logins on a server, it does not direct clients to that server. But when we expanded, we did not want to spend $40k more on Citrix, so we aren't using it anymore.

 

[Warders]

Not sure I know what you want. If you have terminal services load balanced using Network Load Balancing then just enter WLBS stop in the command prompt. This will disable your virtual IP which I assume all of the TS users are pointing at and any new connections will be diverted to available nodes.

If you need to give people a chance to log off the use WLBS drainstop. Once you have finished use WLBS start to reactivate it as a cluster node.

Neil