RDP Keep alive

Hi,
I will have to do some test, but I saw something in the ActiveX, not mstsc about the expiration. Maybe this could help. I think that it's a timeout. What delay for example would you need?

Typically the session timeout is 15 mins but it could be anything depending on your security policy.
I suppose if it needs to be hard coded 5mins would be a good figure.
If possible it would be nice to right click the active sessions tab and select "Keep Alive"

Was this ever implemented?

I know about the Keep Alive setting under the Experience tab for Embedded RDP sessions. But I sometimes need to set the display to External and this prevents me from using the Keep Alive setting.

I just need RDM to inject a mouse or keystroke every 14 minutes (just before the 15 minute timeout). I can't change the group policy setting as I'm not authorized / domain admin, so it's not that simple.

I'm wondering if configuring a macro will do the trick, but I'm not sure.

Hi,
I've already tried to implemented without success. It's still on my todo list with the status: need to find a solution.

Regards

I have accomplished this in the past with other managers by rotating through opened tabs. Perhaps a setting per tab group to allow rotation through the open sessions with a selectable time interval would be possible? The user could then drag/drop sessions from/to the tab group as needed to keep a session alive.

I have created a workaround by running a Autohotkey script on the server. I have attached the script itself with the code, as well as a .exe that you can run directly. You will need to install Autohotkey if you were to run the script, or if you were to modify the script and convert it to a .exe (there's a compiler in the Autohotkey program files directory that you can run). Alternatively, you can just run the .exe file compiled from the script. This does not require Autohotkey to be installed.

Hi, is there still no keep alive feature for RDP? I was used to it in Royal TSX on MacOS.

Hello Martin,

Are you currently using RDM Windows or RDM Mac?

Best regards,

I am using Mac version.

Hi Martin,

This is already on our TODO list. I've increased the priority.

We'll get back in touch when we've made progress.

Best regards,

Hi,

Any idea when this will be implemented? Now that a lot more people are working from home I'm getting asked this question a lot especially by former RoyalTS users who used to have this ability.

Thanks.

Hi,

The ticket is still opened, but we do not have an ETA on this. We will post back when there is progress done.

Best regards,

Hi!
Same question here :)
Is it still planned to implement this functionality?

Hi ad,

For RDM Mac or RDM Windows?

In Mac, the ticket is still opened, but it has not been done yet. We still have no ETA.

Best regards,

Windows.

Hello,

On the Windows version of RDM, the setting is already available. It's located in the "experience" tab of the RDP entry's settings:



Regards,

Thanks, I have already tried that option and it doesn't work for me. I have set it to 300sec, but I'm still get disconnected from RDP session after some time of inactivity (15 mins in my case). I have tried on several different RDP servers (2008 R2, 2012 R2 and 2016).

Just to be sure, in the "advanced" tab, what RDP version is configured? At the moment it will only work with the regular RDP (not FreeRDP).

If it was set to the microsoft RDP and still doesn't work, maybe there is a group policy in your organization that prevents the Keepalive from working. We're using the following property in the ActiveX control to set the keepalive value: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/termserv/imsrdpclientadvancedsettings-keepaliveinterval
It mentions the following:

A group policy setting that specifies whether persistent client
connections to the server are allowed can override this property
setting.

If with all that it still doesn't work, then at the moment we don't have an alternative as the RDP ActiveX is developed by Microsoft. You would have to wait for it to be implemented in FreeRDP.

Regards,

RDP version is set to Latest (not FreeRDP). But it seems that keepAlive option is not helpful in this case.
Here is what I have found:

In the registry at HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server, create or edit the DWORD value of KeepAliveEnable and set it to 1. This will turn Keep Alives on. This will serve to stabilize the connection by sending 'heartbeat' packets to the client every so often. This will cause an idle connection to be probed every so often just to be sure that the connection is still alive and that the client is still listening on the other side. This will also help prevent disconnects by preventing network devices from killing off sockets that it assumes to be idle. Because terminal services is such a low bandwidth protocol, when a user is idle, no network activity will occur. Some network devices will interpret a connection that is in the idle state for an extended period of time to be a dead connection, and thus will terminate the socket. However, when the user comes out of the idle state, the terminal services client can no longer contact the terminal server because the socket is dead. By turning on Keep Alives, the connection will not appear idle, and therefore the network device will not attempt to terminate the socket.

But we are talking about another case here. If there is some timeout set on RDP server for inactive user's sessions then RDP server will disconnect such session (This policy: Administrative Templates/Windows Components/Remote Desktop Services/Remote Desktop Session Host/Session Time Limits).
To prevent it a user must make some mouse moves or any other input. So the solution for this could be periodically sending some mouse move or some "safe" key press to an inactive session.

Hello,

Thanks for the details. Then at the moment we don't have anything on the Windows version either. We'll have to investigate how we can add this as a functionality in RDM. I've opened a ticket for this.

Regards,

Great! Thank you very much!

I have an AutoIT script that imitates mouse moves. It used to work magnificently, but no longer does. I'd love to see this in RDM. Oddly enough, the Keep Alive box in RDM is grayed out - I am unable to select the seconds.

I have created a workaround by running a Autohotkey script on the server. I have attached the script itself with the code, as well as a .exe that you can run directly. You will need to install Autohotkey if you were to run the script, or if you were to modify the script and convert it to a .exe (there's a compiler in the Autohotkey program files directory that you can run). Alternatively, you can just run the .exe file compiled from the script. This does not require Autohotkey to be installed.

Hi. Thanks for this solution! Do you know how to automate the launch of this application on all hosts to which I connect via RDM?

Hi, is there still no keep alive feature for RDP? I was used to it in Royal TSX on MacOS.

Hi Martin,

Hi,

It's been a while. In the latest release (2022.1.8.0), the keep alive feature is now available for RDP sessions. The option can be found in the entry settings under the Experience tab. The "Keep alive" value is set by default to 0, which means it's disabled. Setting any other values will enable the keep alive to be triggered at the time interval selected.

Best regards,

Hi all,

a bit late and maybe slightly off-topic, but I hope this still fits into the context. For those where the keep-alive option does not work as expected or who don't have it at all, there is a little workaround if you can run a program on the remote computer. This works for all remote viewers as far as I can tell.

Download the PortableApp version of VLC to the remote computer so you don't have to install anything. Open "Preferences" and switch to "Show All". Under "Video", check "Disable screensaver". All you need to do now is to open a video file in VLC, activate the loop button and click on the play button.

The more advanced version would be to use the A-B selection, press CTRL-H for minimal view, resize the window so that you only see the top bar of the window and then drag that to the bottom of your screen. The simple loop button does not do the trick here because the VLC window comes up into the foreground after every full loop, but not in an A-B loop.

If you play with the speed settings, you can even define how long it takes to lock again. For instance, a ten minute video played at 1/6th speed without any loop activated will end after an hour.


Best regards!

Hello Limus,

Thank you for sharing a workaround for this issue!

Best regards,