hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1710.txt

Episode: 1710
Title: HPR1710: Windows Remote Desktop on GNU/Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1710/hpr1710.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 08:06:32

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This is HPR episode 1,710 entitled Windows Remote Desktop on New Linux and is part of the
series bash scripting. It is hosted by Ken Fallon and is about 11 minutes long. The summary is
a rapper script force-friared to make connecting to Windows server's painless.
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Hi everybody this is Ken Fallon and I'm trying out easy voice recorder pro on my Android form
for this episode. I want to do a quick episode about Windows Remote Desktop from a
new Linux machine. I have a script that's been evolving. A bash script obviously that's been
evolving for quite some time and I thought now would be a good turn to share that with you.
I have a few different requirements. First of all I want to just be able to type the name of the
server on the console and it should pop up. Then regardless of what screen configuration I'm using,
I wanted to be 90's. I want the screen to always fit on whatever screens I have available.
So on my little laptop I wanted to be 90% smaller than the horizontal and vertical size of the
laptop screen but on my desktop where I have two screens multi-screen environment, you know two
of different sizes. I wanted so that if I move it from one screen to the other one it'll fit
on the smallest one whichever that happens to be. So it'll take the smallest height and the smallest
width and use that as they screen size and then work 90% of that. As we're here in Europe I'm
going to work across different countries. The keyboards that are plugged into the servers on the
other side could be as dirty or any combination of strange keyboards so I always wanted to map
the US keyboard. I want to map a local disk myself so that I can copy files over and back and
it shouldn't wait forever so if the board's not available it should basically time out if I
haven't connected the firewall or something like that. The full script is available on the website
and we'll be linked to in the show notes for this episode but I'll just basically go through it
very quickly and as with all of these recommendations you can if you have other recommendations
or fixes please send them on and I'll incorporate them in if it makes sense to me. So the first line
costs calls bash and the second one's we set two variables one as a server and he's in base name
$0 which is a thing type I learned from the links a lot of links links podcasts deviates I'm still
using that thanks Dave and then I set my port to 3389 which is the port number that RDP uses
and then we do that horizontal vertical size trick and what I'm using is the command called x
r and r which is command line program to get the various different settings so I use
that to find out what my current screen configuration is and I use oxort heading and bc command to
do the calculations for that and I set a variable called size with a horizontal and vertical
size so that's what that is. Then I set three other variables the password username and work group
although in actual practice I have the thing ask me for my password but here's an example of how
you could do that then I have a case statement now that I know the server name has the server
name is the name of the script it will attempt to parse through the server name so most companies
have a you know they will have us servers beginning with us or Dutch servers beginning with NL
for Netherlands or you might have lab servers beginning with lab or whatever so you can use
regular expressions in the case statement so asterix server asterix will will match any server name
that begins with that has the word server in it and then asterix colo asterix is any server that
has the word colo in it and then you're going to also just put in some server and then there you
can set individual password username so rock groups are perhaps you might want to switch keyboards for
that particular server so at the end of that we have the bash command timeout space one and then
I call bash dash c and I echo dev TCP the server in the port and this is a quick trick within bash
to find out if TCP port is open the timeout command will terminate whatever it's calling after one
second if it doesn't receive a reply if you don't do that if you don't do that the thing will time
my goal here was to make sure that I'm not waiting around forever so I'll either have a connection
or it won't so there's no point by default but I think it'll wait something like 15 minutes to
timeout and other solutions like pingings don't really work because firewall rules will prevent ping
from going through while the port itself might be open so this is a nice way of just quick
taking action to the port and moving on for the actual remote desktop session itself I stopped
using the program or desktop because there's essentially a lot of bugs now in newer versions
of rdp that haven't been fixed these we can connect with rdp version six or newer are some of the
SSL protocols they're not accepting certs so I switched to use an x3 or dp and this is the
client behind the rmia or emm i and rmina program so all I do there is then calls that
program first of all if the port is open then I call the x3 rdp forward slash v colons the
server name forward slash size we'll have the size forward slash kbd dash type and a hex string
for the keyboard type and then dash t for the server slash t colon for the workgroup slash u
colon for the username slash u colon for the password slash a which is an add-on colon drive comma
pc as much as choose colon comma and the path that I want to map in this case the root drive slash
and then space forward slash cert dash ignore and then the ampersand to send it into the background
it's a fairly odd from a unique point of view that uses forward slash is instead of the default
plus minus sign but the if you type x3 or dp you'll just see that there as well so to do the
sim linking you've got to make sure that the host names are in your dns or in your host file
and your host file is located in slash etc slash host writeable by root and there you will have
an ip address space one or more names for the servers so for um so you modify download the script
modify it and save it somewhere like use a local bash which is public or put it in your bin
directory if you don't have when you can create one and then you do a link from where it is to
where you want the sim link to be so in our example we have some have in our host file 192168
dot one dot one space some on just core servers the name of a server and then we type
lin ln space dash s for symbolic link forward slash user local bash forward slash rtp the
bash which is the name i get it and then i make the sim link into tilde which my home directory
forward slash bin forward slash some server um you need to make that
executable using um CH mod space plus x space tilde forward slash bin forward slash some server
and then once you type some underscore server it's now an executable script which will find out
that it's called some server and will attempt to connect to the server some server over x free
rdp and when you do that you'll find that your drives map and it's 90% of the screen size and pretty
much always happiness okay that's it for now i hope you enjoyed the show and i hope the quality
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