monline

I've already written about the issue with CoRD and temporary TS client licenses. Since I like using CoRD and the issue prevented me from doing it, I had to add this capability (a client hostname textbox and support for it) to CoRD. I've downloaded the most current version from CoRD's SVN repository and modded the source. In case others might take use of it, I've attached the original source, the modded source, a diff of the two (aka. a patch) and the binary app.

The CoRD utility (based on the famous rdesktop project) allows Mac OS X users to connect to Windows machines via the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) aka. Terminal Services. Unfortunately if the Windows server is a terminal server running in application server mode, then it'll require a TSCAL (Terminal Service Client Access License) from the client. If the client does not provide a valid license, then the server creates a temporary license that is valid for approx. 90 days. This temporary license is based on the so called hardware id that the client sends to the server during the licensing handshake. By default the hardware id is generated from the hostname of the client machine, thus once the temporary license expires, you cannot connect to the TS server anymore. However if you use something else (eg. a random string) as the seed of the hardware id, then a new temporary license is generated on the server every time you connect, providing virtually an unlimited temporary license. As I already wrote, rdesktop has a command line option that you can use to specify the seed (aka. the client hostname) for the license handshake. Unfortunately CoRD does not yet implement this, it takes the same hostname every time. I'm not sure whether it takes the client's hostname or the server's hostname ... in the code I just saw that it takes the hostname from the RDP connection's struct.