With the introduction of NetCFax v2.70 and NetCFax Pro v3.10 the NetCFax client can now be used very flexibly and successfully in most Windows environments. In addition to Windows 98, Windows ME and Windows 2000 Pro, support is provided for both Windows XP Pro systems with the "Fast Task Switching" environment enabled (or not), and on Windows "Server" systems such as Windows 2000 or 2003 Server that are configured to provide a Windows Terminal Services environment, making access available to Remote Desktop Sessions for all networked PC's in their domain.

However, and we feel quite understandably, there are a few important changes from the normal set up that are required if you want the NetCFax client to support this environment successfully. 

The notes below cover all of these changes in considerable detail.

If you have just installed NetCFax v2.70 or NetCFax Pro v3.10 (or later releases) then you will have been prompted to tell the NetCFax client if it is likely to be used under this environment already. If you have upgraded to these new versions you may still need to do this manually.

When you connect to a Windows Terminal Services" (WTS) server using the Microsoft Terminal Services client (known as MTSC or more often RDP [Remote Desktop Protocol]), quite a lot of complex things can happen on the WTS server, at least as far as NetCFax is concerned. This is due to the fact that it is more than likely that several people will be running RDP sessions, from different PC's across your network or even across the Internet, and if they are running the NetCFax client they will all be running the same installation of the NetCFax client that you have installed on the WTS or Domain Controller Server, and of course this is usually occurring at one and the same time.

Due the additional and necessary complexity of this environment, and the additional requirements of the systems, we now allow multiple instances of the NetCFax client to be run on any machine, even under the same Windows login account. However, we do not recommend doing this on normal PC's that are not FTS or RDP based systems, although they will also allow it.

1 - INSTALLATION

The new fax client install systems provided with v2.70 and v3.10 (and later) let you specify if it is going to support multiple users (be working under an RDP environment), and will usually install all the additional files required to support this automatically. 

Don't forget that to install the NetCFax client you must be logged into the Windows server with Administrator rights. If you are running in a Domain controller environment you may prefer to install the client using an RDP session, and this is fine as long as your RDP session login account has administrator rights, or of course you can use the "Run As" feature to run the fax client's installation program with these rights.

Once the client has been installed, and once you have rebooted the machine if recommended to do so, you need to login again with administrator rights again, and then start the new fax client, and install the normal NetCPlus Client Printer driver.

To install this special printer on an RDP server is a simple enough task.

All you need to do is to open Windows Explorer, and navigate to the Fax client's main installation folder, and then open the sub folder named \PRINTERDRIVER. In there will find another RTF file that can be opened with Wordpad, and which fully describes the few steps necessary to install the "NetCFax Remote Desktop Printer". Just follow the steps provided.

Once this is done, the fax client is now ready for use, both locally on the RDP server and via RDP sessions.

2 - PRINTING TO THE FAX PRINTER IN AN RDP ENVIRONMENT

One of the major issues we have addressed is allowing all of the RDP sessions to print to the "NetCFax Client Printer" driver to create faxable files. Normally the fax printer is on the same physical machine as the fax client, and its normal functionality is to request a file name for that newly created faxable file from it's own fax client. This does not work in the WTS environment, so we have introduced a special printer driver that needs to be installed on the WTS server. This is named as the "NetCFax Remote Desktop Printer".

To install this special printer driver is very simple, and is fully documented in the file "remote fax printer installation.rtf" that you can find together with all the file needed to install this printer driver in the special \PrinterDriver sub folder of the NetCFax server installation folder. Just follow the instructions provided and you will see a new printer in the Windows printer folder named "NetCFax Remote Desktop Printer".

Because this printer driver actually uses a DLL to provide the file name, you also have to specify the folder and default file name for this printer to save files to, and therefore, because it is remote printer, all files created will use the same root name you choose for this, and then adds a unique number to the end of each one.

eg: if you were to set this to

C:\program files\fax client\printerfiles\outgoingfax.tif

then each file created by the Remote Printer would use "outgoingfax" as the root of the file name, adding a unique 4 digit number to the end, as shown below -

C:\program files\fax client\printerfiles\outgoingfax0001.tif

All each RDP session user has to do when using the NetCFax client is to ensure they remember to print the data they want faxing to the "NetCFax Remote Desktop Printer", and NOT to the normal "NetCFax Client Printer". If they do print to the NetCFax Client Printer, the file will NOT be created, and an error message will appear on the WTS server screen saying "Unable to get filename". If the fax client is installed on an RDP server and will only ever be used by RDP sessions, we strongly recommend that you manually delete the standard "NetCPlus Client Printer":, an even delete the "NetCPlus Server Printer" if that is also running on the same system, to ensure the RDS sessions will use the correct (and only) fax printer, which is the "NetCFax Remote Desktop Printer".

The other effect of using the "NetCFax Remote Desktop Printer" is that of course the fax client does not receive the normal file name request from the printer driver, and therefore it will not automatically display the fax name dialog that is usually popped up by the fax client. But to send this file off as a fax, you only need to click the Create A New Fax button, and then click the "Select Fax button which will display all of the faxable files held in the Printer files folder for you to select the one you just created. Once you have selected it, you can of course view it from the NetCFax fax creation window to ensure it is the correct one.

3 - LOGIN WINDOW

Because many different people may be starting and running the fax client under different Windows Remote Desktop logins, they will all use the default fax client configuration initially (until they have logged in to a fax server). This means that the option to "Remember me" is potentially dangerous as the last person to use the fax client login may have had administrator access rights, and these would be what would have been "Remembered". Potentially this could allow others to log in using those rights. So to ensure security, this option is disabled if you configure the fax client to be accessible via Remote Desktops.

4 - BROADCAST NOTIFICATIONS FOR FAXES RECEIVED / SENT /.FAILED

Previously, the NetCFax server used the highly efficient UDP protocol to broadcast these notifications across your local network, and because all other machines on the network must have different IP addresses, this works extremely well, and all of the logged in fax clients receive them.

However, In the RDP environment, all fax clients are in reality running on their own (virtual) machines, but have exactly the same IP address, because they are of course all running exactly the same NetCFax client program, and this is only installed once, on the RDP server, so it is this IP address that the client are assigned. This can be checked very easily on the fax server by clicking the current connections field, which shows a full list of all currently connected clients, and all of those that are running under RDP sessions will have exactly the same IP address listed. Of course, this may not be true if you have multiple NICs supporting RDP on the server, as the client will be assigned the IP address of the NIC their RDP connection is using.

Due to this these efficient UDP broadcasts simply do not work very well for the RDP sessions.

We have therefore converted these notifications to use the standard TCP protocol, but they still work in exactly the same way as they do in normal non RDP environments.

5 - THE AUTO RE-LOGIN SYSTEM

The use of this with a NetCFax client under an RDP environment is disabled, as we do not believe it makes much sense to use it under AN RDP ENVIRONMENT.

6 - RUNNING MULTIPLE INSTANCES OF THE FAX CLIENT IN THE SAME LOGIN ACCOUNT

YOU CAN DO THIS on all "normal" PC's if you wish to do so.

YOU CAN USE IT when the NetCFax client is running under the RDP environment or Windows XP Pro with FTS login accounts enabled (if the client was installed with the multiple users option set to NO).

YOU CANNOT USE IT when the NetCFax client is running under the RDP environment or Windows XP Pro with FTS login accounts enabled (if the client was installed with the multiple users option set to YES.

If for whatever reason you want to change this SETTING AFTER INSTALLATION, YOU CAN DO SO BY EDITING THE FOLLOWING FILE ;

X:\...CLIENT INSTALL FOLDER...\DATA\RAW\NCFCLIENT.DAT

By default this will be C:\program files\netcfax client or a similar folder, (but Windows 2000 and 2003 servers may well use a different drive letter)

This is a standard Window INI format file, and can be edited with an ASCII editor, such as Notepad.

Find the section heading shown below

[SYSTEM]

Check in this section for an entry named REMOTEDESKTOP

REMOTEDESKTOP=1

A value of 1 sets the system to assume it is a multiple user system
A value of 0 sets the system to assume it is NOT a multiple user system

Save the file again, ensuring that Notepad does not add .TXT to the end of the file name.

After this, each time a fax client is started, it will honor this setting.

For all those that like to know the real working going on unseen, the following information may be helpful.

There are various additional files that MUST BE INSTALLED in the main NetCFax client installation folder if it is to work correctly in the RDP environment. To make it easier to reinstate this environment, we provide a special sub folder named \RDP that contains all of these files, so all you need to do is to copy all of them to the main folder.

All other functionality OF EACH FAX CLIENT THAT IS RUNNING SHOULD BE EXACTLY THE SAME AS UNDER ANY OTHER WINDOWS ENVIRONMENT.

Because all Remote Desktop sessions are actually running the fax client on the server machine itself, it doesn't matter where you are when you connect a Remote Desktop Session as when you login using the same NetCFax login account, all of your fax client configuration settings will be exactly the same as the last time you used it, as they are only saved on the Remote Desktop Session server.