I have installed RDS Services Host, Gateway and RemoteApps and RDWebAccess on a dedicated remote server that we lease from HostGator. It all works fine running hosted VB6 and VB.NET applications that our customers use.
Until I try to add another user that must have different applications than the first customer. When I try to restrict access, I am prompted that only Active Directory users can be managed in RDS...not local users? From all the Microsoft advertising hype, I thought that RDS would be perfect for our customers that don't want the expense of maintaining hardware to run our applications.
I looked into the option of installing LDAP but have discovered that it will not suffice for RDS user/application management.
So here I am faced with the prospect of creating a domain controller, on a machine with one NIC that is assigned a public IP address. NOTE: There will be no other members of the domain. I would be installing AD just for the purposes of configuring RDS. The domain would be named something like HostMachine.local to not conflict with any possible public domains.
Is this even feasible? I hear that it would make the server insecure. How could it be any more insecure than it already is as a standalone server without active directory? At least with AD I can create policies to restrict access to the disk resources.
Does anyone have suggestions so that I can administer RemoteApps properly? Or is this highly touted RDS technology only meant to be used in a closed LAN environment?
Thanks for any help.
