samba - Apr 2004 - Microsoft restores MultipleUsersOnConnection registry entry for Windows 2000 Terminal servers

Hi all,

This is important news for Samba users who also have Windows 2000
terminal server. You may recall that Windows NT Terminal servers
had a registry entry, MultipleUsersOnConnection, which would cause
Terminal server to open a new TCP session for every logged on user.

Microsoft previously steadfastly refused to make this available
for Windows 2000 terminal servers, this causing poorer performance
with single-threaded Samba servers. As a side note, I was on a 
conference call with Microsoft engineers where they claimed it
was technically *impossible* to add this change, due to the
"re-architecturing" of W2K Terminal server.

Well it turns out that corruption of internal data structures in the
Windows redirector (multi-threaded programming is *HARD*) has
forced them to re-introduce this change to Windows 2000.

Details are here :

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=818528

- from the above :

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To use the new functionality of this fix and to use per user data structures,
you must add the following registry entry on the terminal server.

Subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MRxSmb\Parameters
Type: REG_DWORD
Entry: MultiUserEnabled
Value: 1
This entry enables per-user data structures in the network redirector.

The new registry entry for Windows 2000 Terminal servers is the equivalent of
the MultipleUsersOnConnection entry for Windows NT 4.0 Terminal servers.
------------------------------------------------------

This will restore the performance people were getting with
the earlier Terminal server paramter and Samba. Note you
need to install the HotFix before this new registry parameter
will be enabled.

Many thanks to NetApp for pointing this knowledge base entry
out to Samba users.

Cheers,

	Jeremy.