suzee

Works like a charm! It even automatically re-logs in after vCloud Air's very short session timeout. /Sue

Actually RDM doesn't really freeze up, crash or hang, it is just that clicking on the OK button of the Protocol prompt does nothing, and since it is a modal dialog box, it effectively prevents me from using RDM and forces me to kill it in the Windows Task Manager and restart RDM.

I forgot the embed image feature in this WYSIWYG editor doesn't work. Here is a link to the attached image.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3xs1ghj3z81oh0f/RDM%20VCD%20Protocol%20Prompt.png?dl=0

I too get this error when using VMware's vCloud Air (VCA) service. Attached is a slightly different version of the prompt. It uses the same Flash app, vCloud Director (VCD), that a locally installed vSphere vCenter app uses. Even more annoying that having to answer the prompt every time, it completely hangs up RDM -- first if you don't respond to the prompt within five minutes or so, and second, it pops up everytime vCloud Air issues a session time out and if you don't dispose of the alert, you will return to a frozen RDM.

You could create a free account on VCA to check it out. Note, that when you first log into VCA, you will be using an HTML5 app, but there are links all over to manage your infrastructure in VCD that will launch VCD. In a newly created VDC (Virtual Data Center), click on the Gateways or Networks tab and then click on the link, Manage in vCloud Director on the right. Sometimes, VCA issues the a dialog prompt saying that popups should be allowed (see attached image), but since you're using an embedded Chrome browser, there is no way to enable popups for the VMware domain.

The URL to put into the RDM properties to automatically log in to VCD directly is:

https://iam.vchs.vmware.com/login/authenticate?redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fus-california-1-3.vchs.vmware.com%2Fcompute%2Fcloud%2Forg%2F6{OrgName}&SigAlg=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2F09%2Fxmldsig%23rsa-sha1&Signature={Signature}#/orgUserHome?

I forget where I was able to copy it from, but it works using your OrgName (i.e. account), and Signature.

Thanks, Sue.

Hi,

I've bee away for the week. I believe this is a true bug. The bug does not occur if I launch Chrome from RDM with login parameters for VMware's HTML5 vCloud Air site or their Director Flash site. No message pops up asking if I want to launch an external application. The bug, ie. RDM being totally locked up, occurs when I launch the RDM profile using the embedded Chrome. Maybe the fix is just "Don't do that", but it seems to be some sort of problem with the interaction between RDM and a Chrome alert message. If check the box, "Remember my choice", then RDM sometimes freezes up, but I then I can't directly pin the cause on the request to run the external application.

I say it's a Chrome alert message, but I get the impression that RDM is replicating Chrome's alert messages since the embedded version of Chrome has no GUI. So, regarding this specific alert message, titled: "Protocol handler", saying "Chrome needs to launch an external application, .... do you want to launch the application?", if I respond right away, there is no problem. If I go off and use another app, and come back after 5 minutes, RDM is locked up, i.e. clicking on the Yes or No button does nothing, and/or RDM won't respond to anything. I have to close RDM and re-start it. RDM also locks up if vCloud Director initiates a login on it's own after 20 or 30 minutes, pops up an alert asking again if it is OK to launch the external application, and I don't respond to the alert, then RDM is locked up when I return to RDM.

Sue

VCA has two sites, one called vCloud Air using HTML5 and one for Director using Flash/Flex. The later pops up a request in your embedded Chrome browser as shown in the attachment. If I answer this quickly, all is well. But if I don't, then I often find RDM all locked up and I have to End the task and start over. This also happens long into a session if Chrome and/or Director decide to throw the popup up again and I am not aware of it.

Sue

I gather that you are having to program all the user interactions that are normally done by Chrome. I two issues to report

• One of the web pages I'd like to open, detects that Pop-ups are not enabled and asks me to enable them. How to I set the property in your embedded Chrome browser.

• When I open the VMware vCloud Air site that uses vCloud Director, it prompts me to launch a third party plugin. See 1st attachment. RDM does not remember my choice, but normally I just click through it. However, if I don't do it right away, then the "dialog" window seems to die. Not matter what I click, nothing happens. In fact, I can't use RDM anymore. I have to kill it's task and start over.

• Speaking of the third party plugin, it is the plugin that pops out a console window for any given running VM. This doesn't work. It seems to open up the pop-up as a new browser tab, but a error message is displayed. See 2nd attachment.

Thanks, Sue

Given that it is possible to run multiple copies of RDM (in Windows), including the free version, at the same time, it there a way to change the name and/or the title that appears in the Taskbar. Is there a Registry setting, a configuration setting or global options setting? Thanks

Wow,

That's tremendous. You guys already thought of and implemented the selecting credentials from a folder. Thanks.

Hello again,

Quick connect, obviously, doesn't have all the other settings that I want for the session.

I'v actually figured out a better approach. Configure a session for each host, with all the settings I want, then prompt for the credential. Seems obvious, I know. But I have different User IDs for each host and I'd rather not have the user figure out which UserID goes with which Host. So I can group the UserIDs in a folder for each Host. But the list of UserIDs is long.

What about this as an enhancement. When I enter the name of a credential, if I put in the name of a folder, then just list those credentials in that folder. Not the behavior is to prompt with the whole list when the credential name is not found. Or perhaps RDM could try a search on the "unfound" credential name. That would allow us to set a subset of credentials for any given session. That shouldn't be too difficult to implement, although given time constraints every new enhancement is difficult.

Thanks for the reply.

Re a VPN on the iPad and Mac. I have found the OpenVPN app for both platforms and it is easy enough to start and stop before opening a RDM session. To make a consistent experience on all platforms I may have Windows users do the same.

Another reason to not use the wonderful feature to automatically start and stop the VPN, is that I don't want to create a second copy all of my sessions that don't have a VPN setting. Can you think of any way to have a session ignore the VPN setting if RDM is not running in Windows.

It sure would be nice if there was a scripting ability to problematically control the behavior of RDM.

I just started exploring RDM on my iPad. It is very clean and should be a joy to use.

Ad

But two issues, that plague me on the desktop version as well, are

1. How to reliably and consistently setup, or even understand, how to pass a use rid and password to a website login page. I know JavaScript and have been able to provide some code to perform the submit action, but this seems to work only in Chrome, so on the Mac and the iPad it doesn't work. You have other options, but there is no real explanation how to use them.

2. How to reliably and consistently setup, or even understand, how to get a OpenVPN session to automatically open and close. My OpenVPN Access Server doesn't seem to work with you plunging on the desktop version, so I wrote a custom batch script to open and close the VPN. You even added a feature to allow the batch script to run in the background. But that doesn't work on the Mac or iPad. And on the iPad I can't figure out how to create a VPN session that I can use for other sessions.

Thanks for your support.

Thanks for the suggestion. I haven't explored Quick Connect yet. There are so many ways to do things in RDM, it's very hard to figure out the best way to do things.

I believe I solved my desire to reduce the number of Host / Credential pairs, by creating one session for each host, and then prompting the user for a credential. Obvious, now, but it took me a long time to discover that you could prompt for a credential. It would be nice to tie a list of credentials to a session, but ..... It can be done with a Security Group for each Session, but that seems like overkill.

As for the Custom Variables, they seem to be lots of them, but I don't know what the rules are that govern which fields can receive the values of the Custom Variables. So far none of them get substituted.

Sue

Here is a screen shot of some suggestions for the Clipboard feature. None of them deal-killers, but without any explicit Help on how to actually do the Paste operation, my imagination got the better of me.

I don't get how Copy / Paste Usernames & passwords is supposed to work. When I set the Clipboard option to Paste Once (secure) and Dual Action, the Paste option in the toolbar is always greyed-out. If I right-click while in a Username field, I can select Paste and it pastes the Username. But then I have to select Paste a second time with the cursor in the Password field. Shouldn't it paste both at once. And shouldn't the Paste option in the Session -> Clipboard context menu change (and save) the Username and Password for the session.

If I set the Clipboard Option to Single Action, then the Copy Username & Password command is not present in the toolbar and the Session context menu. I presume this is correct. But I copy a password and the Paste command is present when the cursor is in the Username field. Shouldn't the Paste command be greyed-out if you are Pasting into the wrong field.

I want to use RDM to assist in developing / testing / supporting a website application. Rather than duplicate multiple logins for each site (with a different host URL), is there a way to prompt the user for a website, save the user's response in a custom variable and then set the host URL to that variable?

Pointers to forum / blog entries and/or white papers would be helpful. Thanks

What is the Refresh key. I tried CTRL-F5. No luck neither the parent folder would delete, nor a sub-folder. Then I renamed one of the sub-folders, that caused it two siblings to disappear. Then I was able to delete the folder I just renamed.

No, that's not it. I have MS Access connected to the Azure SQL database. I don't think it is a good idea to delete the sessions directly using SQL because I don't know your Schema.

What I am asking it how to delete a folder when I issue the Edit -> Delete Entry .. command and nothing happens, i.e. it just stays there.

Thanks, for the response. I meant to say above: "If you login with a database user, that is not a RDM user ...", so yes, as long as I create the user in RDM, it works fine. And I found the Clipboard-Copy and Clipboard-Paste -- all be it in a strange place.

My next dilemma, due to lots of copying and pasting between two data sources -- one with admin privileges and one with access to limited security groups, is that I can't delete a some empty folders. They appeared kind of magically for the limited user after being deleted by the admin user. But after giving both users access to the folders, when I delete them, nothing happens.

I have connected to the Azure database with Visual Studio and MS Access, so I could delete them directly out of the database, but that seems too dangerous. Do you have a script, or some trick to force the delete?

Thanks, Sue

I guess it's working -- as long as you are logged into the data source with a RDM User. If you login with a database user, that is not a database user, such as the database owner, it doesn't work.

It's not quite working. When I click on Private Vault, a top level folder appears with the same name as the "All Entries" data source. But when I try add a connection or credential, nothing happens.

BTW, is it possible to copy a connection from All Entries to the Private Vault?

I tried starting over. RDM was able to find the database in the xxxx.database.windows.net server, so I assume the connection worked. Then I went to the Upgrade tab and pressed Create Database. RDM said it was already created. So I pressed Update Database. That worked. It's not exactly the most intuitive work flow and there doesn't seem to be any documentation on how to create such a database.

I just created the Azure SQL database and can connect to it in Visual Studio, so I believe the on DBO user has full access. The Create Database and Update Database buttons are both greyed out (i.e. disabled). Any other suggestions?

I'm pretty sure that the connection information is correct as well as the UserId and Password, because RDM was able to query the database name, but then I got an error message saying: Unable to connect to the database! Invalid object name, 'Connections'.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/03g7gwlg3ekjkds/2016-08-06_3-35-46.png?dl=0

Robin

PS: I still can't get an image to be part of a message. I guess a link will work.

Olivier,

Installing Flash by running the downloaded executable, with Chrome closed, worked. It should be noted that you have to restart RDM as well.

As for logging in to the both the vCloud Air Web Console and vCloud Director, you need to use two different Browser URLs, but the Login page works the same. I figured out the following settings:

vCloud Air

Display: Embedded

General

Browser URL: https://us-california-1-3.vchs.vmware.com/compute/ui/

?orgName=aba......-....-....-....-............

&serviceInstanceId=a123bc45-d6ef-...-....-.........f89

&InstanceId=a123bc45-d6ef-...-....-.........f89

Web browser app: Google Chrome

Login:

Username: {VCA_Username}

Password: {VCA_Password}

Auto fill login: checked

Auto submit: not checked

Form ID: loginForm

Username ID: username

Password ID: password

Login button ID: loginButton

Custom script: loginButton.disabled=false;

username="same as above"

password="same as above"

loginButton.click();

vCloud Director

Display: Embedded

General

Broswer URL: https://iam.vchs.vmware.com/login/authenticate

?redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fus-california-1-.vchs.vmware.com%2Fcompute%2Fcloud%2F

org%2Faba......-....-....-....-............

&SigAlg=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2F09%2Fxmldsig%23rsa-sha1

&Signature=....#/orgUserHome?

Login:

Same as above