Thursday, January 19, 2012

Administrator Mode on the HP t5335z?

I have a new HP t5335z Thin Client device with the annoying feature out of the box of going into suspend mode (?) after several minutes of inactivity.  Nobody on the HP support forums seems to know how to change that feature, so I thought I'd ask the easier question of how to get into the device as an administrator.  No replies from the HP community to that either, so I had to figure it out myself.  Here's the answer for gaining administrative access.
  • Install the HP ThinClient Smart Client Service on a computer on the same subnet as the thin client. 
    • Before installing, you have to have IIS running on the computer and .NET framework 3.5. See this link to get your server machine configured properly.
    • Download the software from here.  A default installation is fine. 
I installed the Smart Client Service on a Windows 7 machine, so here's what worked on that platform. Other operating systems may be different.
  • In the Windows 7 Start menu, navigate to the hp Profile Editor icon. Left-click and choose "Run as Administrator." Unless you Run as Administrator, you cannot save changes to the profile.
  • Go to the Registry Editor section of the Profile Editor. Select your platform and check the box for Show all settings.
  • Scroll down to users. Expand the folder until you get to users/user/apps/hptc-root-xterm. Select authorized and enter the value 1 in the text box.
  • Click Next two times and then select Save Profile and then Finish.
  • Find the file, profile.xml, on your computer and change the permissions. Right click on the file, select properties, select the security tab and click the Edit button to change permissions. Add "Everyone" and give them full control.
  • Turn off the Windows (or other) Firewall on your server machine.  If you don't, the thin client will not be able to grab the profile.  You can turn it back on after you update the profile on the thin client.
  • Boot the t5335z and it should connect to the server, download the profile changes you saved and run them. If it worked, and it did for me, you now have root access to the device through the xterm window. You get there from Settings/Additional Configuration menu (X Terminal). Good Luck (it shouldn't be this hard)!

3 comments:

June said...

Thanks John. It is very usefull, I have entered the administrator mode as you said. Have you tried to install software on t5335z client,such as a tar file?

Chris said...

Hi John

Thanks for the hints, how to do that.
We bought the same device for our company. And I have another problem, where the support forums seems to have no answer:

- I want to connect to our Citrix servers(XenApp6) and the data I have from the old thin-client (neoware... really old ones ;)) provides RC5-128Bit encription. Means: I cannot connect to the desktop application, because windows tells me: encryption not good enough.
But I didn't find any options in the profile editor.

Do you have an idea? :)

Greetings,
Chris

John Redmond said...

Here are some relevant and helpful links to additional information provided by others. FYI, I found that after updating the image of a thin client to the latest image downloaded from HP, I had to push the address of the Smart Client Server to the client via DHCP Option 137. These links helped me update the image and configure DHCP:
http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Workstations-Thin-Clients/Update-image-with-smart-update-service/td-p/5904597#.UgPxro3bNyI
http://www.ingmarverheij.com/hp-smart-zero-client-a-first-impression/