Microsoft RDP

Microsoft RDP

Introduction

At some point Virtual Box came with RDP as part of the set up and its allegedly faster than VNC. I want to connect my ipodtouch to my PC's using Mocha's RDP Lite.

Problem

I have a windows 7 beta VM. (See my Sun blog.) Initially I couldn't connect using Ipod or Alienware.

I am now connected using the Alienware and the Microsoft client. The Host is XP Home Edition, SP/3 with a W7 VM hosted in VB 2.2.4, networking = bridged, port = !3389, with the NULL authentication libraries. NB the port is not available on the internet. It does not work with external authentication, and the manual suggests that guest is experimental.

Perry says I need to have the VRDPAuth.dll library in a folder that is pointed to by the %PATH variable. This page at computerhope.com explains how to do it.

I don't know if port 3389 will work or not because of the order of the testing, but the Mochasoft Client is still not working. They have a FAQ. I can't get it to work on the EDGE either. Mochasoft suggest an incompatibility or a firewall as the problem. So

• fix the authentication problems and turn it on
• sort out the mochasoft problems

What didn't work!

I had assumed that the initial failures were due to the failure to present the RDP port to the LAN and I tried to map the VM port to the real port. My VM was a NAT machine. I wrote about port mapping on my blog when I exposed apache to my network. I need to port the script, maybe now is the time to wrap it in TCL. The Virtual Box 2.1.4 manual discusses port forwarding in Section 6.1.4. This fails. The W7 image fails to boot; using [gs]etextradata to map port 3389 from the guest to the host causes the VM to fail to boot. I have amended the VM config to chnage the port as suggested by this thread at http://forums.virtualbox.org and this blog at http://www.ubuntugeek.com. I still get "your remote session has ended". PerryG says you must use bridged networking.

Enabling Scripts

I want to write bash scripts to be emulated using cygwin. This has a problem in that XP uses spaces in its file folder hierarchies and the environment variable initialisation process isn't good enough.

VBoxManage.exe list vms

doesn't work and list systemproperties shows it thinks that the .VirtualBox directory is in the cygwin home.

This thread at Virtual Box fourms discusses the issue. It seems to be not quite appropriate.

I have added the following code to .bashrc

type -p VBoxManage.exe > /dev/null
case $? in
0)   : ;;
1)   export PATH=/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Sun/xVM VirtualBox:${PATH} ;;
esac

This prepends the vbox directory to the Path. VBoxManage.exe list vms seems to work from the home directory now.

I have installed a new bash.bat file. This is located beside cygwin.bat. It consists of,

@echo off
    :: Dave Levy (c) 2009         Is this GPL?
    :: bash.bat                   Version 1.0
    :: Wrapper to run *sh scripts from windows explorer/desktop
    c:\ksh\bin\bash --login %*

This is also covered on my blog in an article called Using Cygwin to manage script Virtual Box tasks.

Next I need to invoke it from tcl/tk.

Links

N.B. The Virtual Box manual is the first port of call. Otherwise these might be usefull.

• Remote Desktop Connection Software Download at microsoft.com >> Windows XP. This page details how to install RDP onto a Home Edition XP build.
• Get started using Remote Desktop with Windows XP Professional at microsoft.com >> Windows XP. This page makes it clear that RDP doesn't come with my version of XP.
• Frequently Asked Questions About Remote Desktop at microsoft.com >> Windows XP