monline

Nice trick indeed. It works with just "Clipboard mapping" enabled, no need to have "drive mapping" too. Of course this is a hack around a policy ... usually drive mapping is disabled by the server admin for a reason.

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.

If you connect with rdesktop to a Windows 2003 Terminal Server, then you cannot use a TSCAL (Terminal Services Client Access License). The server automatically assigns a temporary license to your client that is valid for 90 days. You can cheat on this by using the "-n <hostname>" switch. The server assigns the license based on the hostname that your rdesktop client sends during the build up of the connection, so by changing it you can "renew" your temporary license a virtually indefinite number of times. You can use any sort of hostname, it does not have to be a valid hostname on your network.

The Remote Desktop Connection client stores its default settings in .RDP files. The list of available config parameters can be found in a Knowledge Base article.

We had some problems at our office with Terminal Services (the server produced BSOD from time to time, when a specific user logged off from his session) and I found the following page during my googling: TS + Citrix Troubleshooting. It contains a number of useful tips and a lot of Windows bugs + hotfixes that might help you solve the problem.

The symptom is that if you start Terminal Services Manager (aka. TSM) and double-click on another server of your domain in the list (to get the list of sessions on that TS server), then that server simply disappears from the server list. A possible reason for this might be a denied registry access!

I just found this article. It discusses an extension (downloadable from the site) to Terminal Services. It allows one to launch an application that will run on the Terminal Server, but it'll be rendered only as a window and not inside a full, remote desktop. Nice. The functionality is already familiar from the Citrix Terminal Services extensions, however this solution is for free.

Microsoft introduced some new commands for TS environments in Windows 2003. It's worth to take a look at them.