Installation on a terminal server

PDFCreator Terminal Server license and setup are required for installing PDFCreator on a Terminal Server. The license is valid for a single Terminal Server with an unlimited amount of users. In order to run it on more than one Terminal Server, you can purchase multiple licenses.

To install PDFCreator Terminal Server, you have to bring the server into installation mode:

  1. In a command box switch to the installation mode with “change user / install”

  2. Run the setup

  3. If the setup has finished switch back to the application mode with “change user /execute”

Attention

Please make sure to see Licensing service configuration!

Activation service for terminal servers

The PDFCreator Terminal Server includes a service to manage the activations for all users.

The service will contact our license server at the startup and every 24 hours and save the activation response to the HKLM branch of the registry. As the Terminal Server edition is activated per machine, the license has to be stored in HKLM. This is especially important when running a Terminal Server farm where the users might roam between different servers. As the activation is stored on the server, the user will be able to use the software directly and the server activation will not interfere with possible desktop activations the user might have additionally. If the connection attempt fails, it will be retried on an hourly basis.

Therefore, the service needs to be able to contact license.pdfforge.org and have permission to write to HKLM. Unless configured differently, it will use the default system proxy settings, please ensure these are configured correctly if the machine is behind a proxy server (see Define a proxy server). Depending on the version of your OS, additional connections to ocsp.msocsp.com and ocsp2.globalsign.com might be required to check our SSL certificate.

Licensing service configuration

By default, the activation service will be run by the local system account. In most system configurations, it is required to run the service as a different user who can contact our license server and has rights to write to the server’s HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.

We recommend you to create a new user account to handle the PDFCreator Terminal Server service to prevent issues.

Tip

If you don’t know how to set up a new user, please see the following guide: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc505882.aspx

This account will need the following permissions to provide PDFCreator Terminal Server with the required permissions:
  • Read/write access in Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\pdfforge\PDFCreator

  • Access to our license server on license.pdfforge.org

To access the service settings, open the Windows service management (services.msc) and double click “PDFCreator Licensing Service”.

Select the Tab ‘Log On’ and assign the newly created user account.

Make sure the starttype for “PDFCreator Licensing Service” is “Automatic” or “Automatic (delayed)”!

By default, the activation service will be run by the local system account. Depending on your system configuration, it might be required to run it as a different user who can contact our license server and has rights to write to HKLM.

Define a proxy server

To define a proxy server for the licensing service, create the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\pdfforge\PDFCreator\LicenseServerProxy.

Under this key, create a string value with the name “Url” and the URL of your proxy server, i.e. “https://proxy.mycompany.local:8080”. This will use proxy.mycompany.local as host, the https protocol and port 8080 to connect.

Note

The names in the registry are case-sensitive, so please make sure to check the spelling.

To add authentication, you can specify the registry values “Username” and “Password” (both have to be present) to authenticate via the Basic Authentication method.