swinster

cool, thanks guys

Thank Mark,

If these are depreciated, it would be good to move to the newer options, but to answer you question, yes, you can CTRL+Mouse scroll in Putty within RDM and the terminal will zoom. This is incredibly useful, and I can see no way of doing this simply in the current SSH Shell.

Hi,

Several years ago I setup some Putty SSH connection. WHen I connect to these I am able to Crtl+Mouse Scroll to zoom the font size on the terminal - very useful for training.

I can seemingly switch the connection to SSH Rebex (which I cannot seem to zoom), but worse new SSH connections don't give me the Putty option at all. How can I get this back or how can I make the inbuilt terminal client zoom with a mouse scroll?

Hi David,

Are you talking about the option in "User Interface --> Tree View --> Merge Credential List with Sessions"?

I understand the workaround, although it is very non-intuitive and as such is awkward. I can understand that if you want to show merged Credentials with the Sessions, the way you have things setup would make sense, but the default is NOT to merge the lists and as such they should be separate entities.

I think this is certainly an area you could improve upon in the future.

Many thanks

Chris

Hi,

I'm not sure if this is a bug or a "feature", but in either case it doesn't make much sense (at least not to me).

In the navigation pane (when looking in Tree view) you have a separate group/store for Credentials and Sessions. This is as I think it would be - it doesn't necassarily follow that you you wish to organise your session as you would organise you Credentials, and the fact that you can apply credentials to a session group/folder or an individual session from any Credential location is great, especially were the same credentials apply to multiple places.

However, when you go to add a new Credential, then wish to assign this to a new folder within the Credentials group, RDM doesn't even show the Credentials Group but insitis on showing ONLY the Sessions group, and any folders you have created specifically in the Credentials group show up as part of the Sessions group. If you then create a folder in the Credentals Group, RDM add the same blank folder in the Session Group then I have to create credential in this group before if shows in the Credential Group. Once done, you then have to delete the blank folders in the session group.

This all seems a bit cumbersome.

• Why do you have to create a Session folder to store a Credential?

• Why does the Credential store not show up when creating a new credential in a folder?

Cheers

Chris

Any more new on this, Maurice?

Thanks for this David. Interestingly though, switching from "Ping" to "Port Scan yielded the same result - RDM thought that the server were offline and showed them in red - even after a restart of RDM. However, switching the mode off completely, then onto "Port Scan" seems to have resolved the issue.

Ah, and the fact that some of my servers don't respond to ping's would explain why some are red and some are black, even though ALL are actually on-line. I do see the port scan option, but I wonder what ports are scanned?

I take it that this option works on a per client basis, so the results may not be the same for all RDM clients depending on firewall rules on the servers and where the RDM client might be connected?

Cheers

Chris

edited by swinster on 5/18/2014

Hi,

I have looked through the forum and online help but have been unable to figure this out. I have just started using Remote Desktop Manager and in the first instance I have created several Groups/folder containing RDP sessions. I'm view with navigation and in Tree Mode, and several of the RDP session show in Red writing, whereas other show in Black.

What does this mean?

Regards,

CHris

Hi Maurice,

Any new on this?

Cheers

Chris

edited by swinster on 5/16/2014

Hi Maurice,

When you say "are you in a position to try it?", do you mean do I have administrative rights on the vCentre server? If so then no, this is maintain by other, I simply manage our VM within vCentre. We to have access to a stand alone ESXi host (as mentioned above) that is running an older system (5.0), however, this seems to work OK with the current Remote Console.

If you mean, have I installed VMware PowerCLI, well then yes I have (on my local machine). I have just install the lasted version (5.5) although it seem to install the the remote console plug in for 5.1. What I'm not sure if is the response I'm getting back from vCentre in that it cannot find the VM I am trying to run - maybe I'm simply not pointing to the correct location (hence the original question relating to VM ID and location of vmx file)?????

Other than that, I'm ready to go.

Look forward to hearing from you

Chris

edited by swinster on 5/13/2014

Hi,

I have been meaning to get around to using RDM for a loooooong time, but only now have finally taken the plunge. At the moment I'm only running a standard copy but am trying to set up VM Remote Consoles (looks like the VM Client is only available in the Enterprise, but it seem to be in the process of being depreciated in any case). WRT to the "VMWare Remote Console", you don't seem to have a lot of info about how to construct the location of the .vmx file, or where to get the VM ID from. However, after a bit of reading this forum, looks like the .vmx file name is refernced such that:

[datastorename] Folder/VMmachine.vmx

I have this working on a single ESXi host running ESXi 5.0.0.469512, but run into an error when trying to connect to vCentre Sever running 5.5.0.1476327. Looks like VMware is returns a "Page Not Found" error - perhaps I am simply not referencing the vmx file correctly? Is it possible to get a VM ID without have access to the CLI?

Any ideas?

Chris

Cheers Brendan. WRT the password storage, I actually had this reponse from Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 David Hervieux (CEO ) at Devsolutions:

"For the offline mode, it’s double encrypted with AES and the NTFS encryption. You can also set an expiration to make sure that it’s not usable after a certain period."

WRT the main crux of the question, David was not able to offer any solutions, however, I have since been in touch with the guys at BitVise to see if the basic concept was at least achievable, and they had this to say:

"Given the situation as described, I think adding an SSH server to the access servers could be useful.

The SSH server could be used in multiple ways:

1) In an approach that's least different from what you're using now, the SSH server could be used to tunnel a Remote Desktop connection when your tech people need to access your infrastructure from a customer's location with restrictive port forwarding rules.

To enable connectivity in this situation, I would suggest configuring the SSH server to accept connections on port 443, as well as a random port number between 1024 and 65535. Only the most restrictive firewalls will prevent a connection to an SSH server configured this way. When you're accessing your servers from a client location, you could use Bitvise SSH Client to establish the SSH connection, and then use its single-click Remote Desktop forwarding feature to initiate the Remote Desktop session, all through an SSH tunnel.

2) In a different approach, it would also be possible to use SSH to tunnel connections using other remote access protocols (HTTPS, SSH, VNC) directly to remote devices you're administering. In this case, the client applications using those protocols would need to be moved from the access server to the client running SSH. This approach will be easier if the device-specific clients you're using support connecting through a SOCKS proxy, since you can then configure the SSH client to act as a proxy. However, it's also possible to configure port forwarding rules manually for applications that don't support connecting through a proxy.

If you established SSH tunnels this way, then yes, the TCP/IP connections arriving at your remote devices would appear to originate from the machine where the SSH server is installed, e.g. from the access server."

So, their is maybe hope. The long and short of it is that I don't know whether the remote devices will accept traffic via a SOCKS proxy - also, I haven't really dealt with SOCKS Proxies in the past, only ISA.

Chris

edited by swinster on 11/20/2012

Just to clarify (a bit) here are a couple of quick diagrams showing generic outline of the current and proposed idea (not all possible connections are shown, but this should give an idea).

• All local and remote techies need access to all access server (diagram might not make that 100% clear).

• SSL/SSH tunnel is only between the techies workstation/laptop and access server - on bound connections will be in the required remote use protocol (HTTPS, SSH, VNC, etc)

• Each access server is used to access a specific set of remote services

Current Usage

Proposed Usage

edited by swinster on 11/18/2012

edited by swinster on 11/18/2012

edited by swinster on 11/18/2012

Hi,

Last night I wrote an email the the support team at Devsolutions, but thought I'd throw it open to others to see if this is a feasible idea.

I have been playing on and off with RDM for some time but I haven’t really looked at its full potential. I believe the application will pretty much do what I’m looking for (maybe with additional software) but I’d though I’d check before perusing any further.

We are a small team (5 techies) but manage a large number of remote servers and services using a variety protocols (mainly HTTPS (not remote desktop, but still remote management), SSH, VNC, etc.) and to do this we use a few access servers (will be Windows 2008) depending on the endpoint we are managing. The endpoints themselves site behind multiple corporate firewalls so the management of these services has to be initiated from the relevant access server. However, the connection to these access servers is generally via RDP, which means the techies are on their workstations/laptops, then RDP into an access server and can then remotely manage the relevant endpoint via the RDP session. However, there are a number of issues with this.

Firstly, the RDP sessions on a Windows box (not in Terminal Services mode) is limited to 2 per server. Secondary, RDP isn’t necessarily the securest protocol in the world. Thirdly, whilst the techies can easily RDP to the access server it they are on our site, if they are at the customer site they still may need this RDP access, which itself can often be blocked by the customers firewall rules – and often we don’t have simple physical access or local IP access to the relevant endpoints.

I initially thought of running RDM clients on the access servers, but I don’t think this would be the simplest solution – you would still need to use RDP to get into the access servers, and potentially set up separate password stores.

So, I was thinking that if we could create an SSL tunnel (something like sTunnel with uses OpenSSL) from the techies laptops to the access servers, they could then use the tunnel remote manage the endpoint in question using RDM on locally on their workstation/laptop, essentially using the access servers as a proxy. Because there are multiple access servers, I don’t think a single VPN would work without setting up some complex routing rules, but if each of the access servers were able to accept a tunnel connection, then maybe RDM could be used to direct the relevant connections using the relevant tunnel. Is this feasible, if not could RDM be used in another way? Has anyone setup anything similar to this, if so what did you use and how did you set it up?

The other issue we have is that of password security yet maintaining synchronisation. If I’m correct, RDM can connect through a backend MS SQL DB and maintain an offline cache thus enabling the techies to always have the latest passwords. Is this correct? What are the security implications of this, such as how are the passwords stored?

I look forward to your response.

Chris

edited by swinster on 11/18/2012

edited by swinster on 11/18/2012

edited by swinster on 11/18/2012