> I provide remote support via terminal services session
> over a SSH tunnel, one or two other users come in from the 'net via
> a VPN tunnel.

I forgot to mention this. Terminal Services is great for support.

You don't need to deal with techos who are paranoid you might come in
and hack them or something if they give you their IP address which
adds an extra 15 minutes to a support incident just trying to VNC in
etc. It also opens up the possibilities of hosting your customers
(which we do). A good question to ask self hosting customers was 'when
was your last verified backup?'. Often it was the last support
incident when you backed it up to run it offline. For our hosted
customers I can say that their last verified backup was 4 hours ago,
and that they are running a RAID 5 setup, not some out box they found
in the corner with a single 4 year old HD. I can also say that our
server is hosted in a datacentre with multiple connections to
different backbone providers with a guaranteed bandwidth, backup power
generators, backup air conditioning units, redundant power supplies,
redundant network cards and armed guards.

If their headoffice goes offline at a mission-critical time, they can
connect from a different location (like their home) to do what needs
to be done.

There is also no buck passing. If our server ever goes down, it is us
who must fix it. We have the expertise, the experience and the motive
to get it fixed quickly. Customers' techos (especially those not big
enough to have them in-house) often don't understand the importance of
a timely resolution.

Mostly it is the customers ADSL line and we advise them all is working
(we are a remote site to our datacentre as well). I find that self
hosted companies have a much slower issue resolve time. Put simply,
they call us because they can't connect and want us to assist but we
can't connect either. We then play pingpong with their IT support
trying to get the server back online and that is beyond our control.
Further, their support (which is frequently outsourced) doesn't bother
calling us back when it is resolved so the customer is waiting even
longer still.

It would be nice if their was a bit more flexibility with remoting a
session, for example, allowing key users in an organisation to remote
control any session in their organisations security group. At the
moment, they would have to be administrator which I refuse to allow. I
am not 100% comfortable that our implementation team have
administrator rights.

>
> If a link drops out the terminal server session remains running,
> so all the user does is reconnect to their previous session and
> keep working from where they were before. No lost data, minimal
> lost time.

Yes, and timeouts can be used as well to minimise unused connections
(for example, automatically log the user off if they are disconnected
for 3 hours).

> Incidently, the client recently had someone demonstrate the use
> of a Linux server as a terminal server - not the conventional
> X-windows arrangement, but actually as a server that Windows
> RDP clients could connect to. They setup Wine to run my Windows
> based database application and used OpenOffice, Firefox and
> Thunderbird directly on Linux.

This would be a very interesting project. CALs are expensive.

I should mention the unofficial client did not support file or printer
redirection which would make reporting more difficult, but we could
implement an auto-emailer to work around that.

Adam