Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software
Microsoft, please fix Remote Desktop Connection for Mac
I live something of a double life. By night I am a highly influential, and very sexy, Apple blogger/pundit but by day I am a highly skilled Windows System Administrator (though I'm still very sexy). Thanks to the confluence of a nice boss and Intel Macs I am able to do all my work on a shiny new MacBook Pro. However, there is one application that I find myself using, and cursing, on a daily basis: Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection.
Don't get me wrong, I think it is fantastic that MS makes this program available for the Mac, but it just wasn't created for someone who needs to connect to multiple Windows machines in any way. I know that the MacBU is hard at work on a Universal version of Remote Desktop Connection, so I thought I would list my major gripes with the program to help them focus on what I want (and isn't that what they truly care about?):
- No concurrent connections: Often, I need to log into more than one Windows machine at the same time. This is very easy to do within Windows itself, thanks to the magic of MMCs (that's Microsoft Management Consoles to you), but nearly impossible using RDC on the Mac. The client only supports one connection at a time, so you're out of luck if you are troubleshooting a cluster with 2 Windows nodes. The work around is to create a number of duplicates of the program itself, so you can have multiple copies of the app running. This is lame.
- Disconnecting from a remote machine quits the app: This is the most annoying aspect of RDC. So, I can't connect to more than one machine at the same time, no big deal. I'll just connect to one after the other. Sadly, RDC quits the moment you disconnect from a remote machine. This means you need to relaunch the program to connect to another machine. This is stupid.
Get a WordPress.com Blog
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Movieboy said 2:40PM on 10-10-2006
If you are not currently using RDC Menu, you should check it out. It essentially solves both issues that you talk about. It allows multiple instances of RDC, and it allows easy access to open the connection in the first place. Check it out.
http://www.xutils.com/rdcmenu/
Reply
mroach said 2:42PM on 10-10-2006
I'm in the same boat as you. It would be real nice if they could port the Remote Desktops MMC that ships with Windows Server 2003. I have a few gripes about that one, but it's still a lot better than RDC for Mac.
Reply
Chadwick said 2:52PM on 10-10-2006
Don't forget rdesktop:
http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/package.php/rdesktop
I'm not familiar enough with it to know if the features are covered, but open-source project may give you a better chance that your requests will be heard.
Reply
Jean-Francois said 3:08PM on 10-10-2006
I discovered CoRD a week ago and it works great!
http://cord.sourceforge.net/
Uses rdesktop with a Cocoa frontend. You can connect to multiple desktops at the same time from the same window.
Reply
Janak Parekh said 2:59PM on 10-10-2006
Scott,
You *can* actually launch multiple instances of Microsoft's client, but it's highly undocumented. At the command prompt, type:
/System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Support/LaunchCFMApp /Applications/Remote Desktop Connection/Remote Desktop Connection
... or set an alias to it, or script it, and it will start up a new copy. I should submit this to OSXHints, I guess.
Also, I got rdesktop working (via darwinports/macports) and it actually performs better on my G4 Powerbook than the Microsoft client. There's also a GUI for it called "tsclient" available on darwinports... admittedly, it's X and not Carbon, but at least it's maintained, until the MacBU gets around to their new release.
Reply
Lon Farenwald said 3:00PM on 10-10-2006
Amen, brutha. Same boat. I also notice that the performance of the Mac RDC is not up to snuff with, say, the native XP client. RDC menu looks promising, though.
Reply
Janak Parekh said 3:02PM on 10-10-2006
... for some reason, TUAW is not rendering the entire string on the screen in my Firefox, although it's there and should correctly copy-and-paste. That's "LaunchCFMApp" on the right of the first line.
I presume the RDC Menu app just runs this command.
Reply
Chris Knight said 3:22PM on 10-10-2006
There's a Cocoa port of rdesktop which showed up recently: http://cord.sourceforge.net/ I haven't tried it (we're an all-Citrix shop now), but it looks nifty...
Reply
Brad said 3:25PM on 10-10-2006
Thanks for bringing this up. The biggest gripe I have is performance. It runs painfully slow on a Mac Mini I have. I know it's not a newer model Mac, but RDC works perfectly on really, realy old PC's.
Reply
Bigcake said 3:27PM on 10-10-2006
CoRD is a remote desktop client for Mac OS X ported from the UNIX program rdesktop. It is a Universal Binary, and allows you to connect to multiple servers concurrently.
Pretty impressive for a 0.2 release!!
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/22770
Reply
Christina said 3:51PM on 10-10-2006
I have that same problem. I do QA on Windows machines and often have to connect to multiple machines from my personal MBP. My solution so far has been to make a single RD connection to my work machine (with XP) and from there use MMC to connect to my many work boxes. The advantage is that all my work stuff stays in one place, the XP box. I know leapfrogging isn't the most efficient way to do things, but it works for me.
Reply
Eric J said 3:54PM on 10-10-2006
I think the RDC "bookmarks" system is extremely clunky. It'd be nice if I could just pick a connection from a list, and have it automatically load the correct username/password, instead of deal with saving a distinct file for every connection.
Reply
Chris Janton said 5:06PM on 10-10-2006
And don't forget RDC Launcher at
http://homepage.mac.com/jshelton/.Public/RDC%20Launcher%201.0.1.zip
Multiple instances of RDC
Reply
Eric J said 3:56PM on 10-10-2006
SIMPLE solution for multiple connections: Just make multiple copies of the RDC app. I have three, "RDC1","RDC2" and "RDC3".
Reply
Billifer said 4:00PM on 10-10-2006
Hey Scott,
I don't connect to dozens or more systems -- just one system, but from both inside and outside the firewall, so it has a different address. There's a difference in scale, but what I've done to get around the annoyances is (1) save the settings for each system into the .rdc files that RDC supports; then (2) write AppleScripts and save them as self-running applications to launch those .rdc files; then (3) using something like Quicksilver [I prefer Namely], two or three keystrokes will connect to a system, voila!
My Script looks like this:
tell application "Finder"
set my_home to home as text
set dumb_file to my_home & "Library:Favorites:Favorite Servers:Dumbledore Local.rdc"
open dumb_file
end tell
Now that I've read about rdesktop and CoRD above, though, I just might have to check those out!
Reply
David said 4:08PM on 10-10-2006
Again, one more person here with the same gripes. I have one more to add.
Perhaps it's just me but if I enter the wrong address into the box by mistake it will tell me it can't connect and dump me back at the address box. Thats all normal, but if I correct the address and try it again it still won't work.
So if I ever enter the address wrong, I need to quit the program, start it again and then try to connect with the correct address.
Some good tips have been posted here so I'll check them out later.
Reply
Jim Hummel said 4:10PM on 10-10-2006
There is an AppleScript out there that launches another RDP session that's independent of each other. I used to use it every day at my last job.
I believe I read about it via the.taoofmac.com, but I'll see if I can find the link to the script. Incedibly useful.
Reply
Stephen said 4:11PM on 10-10-2006
Oooh! I'm an Apple fanboy by day and a Windows System Administrator by night (I hate my job).
Reply
Kyle Bradshaw said 4:32PM on 10-10-2006
Amen!
All of these gripes I have experienced. I actually got parallels JUST so I can use Windows for Remote Desktop. What a pain..
Reply
Colin Bates said 4:41PM on 10-11-2006
I've been getting quick launching by saving my individual server connections to a connection profiles folder, and add that to my Quicksilver catalogue: ctrl + Space Bar , type the server name, hit enter and I'm in.
Then, my biggest gripe, midway through my RDC session, copy-and-paste from Windows to OS X packs up...
CoRD download in progress!
Reply