Hey,

Recent Windows Server release (like 2012) seems to require some additional feature the good old “rdesktop” tools do not handle. Here is what happens when connecting:

Autoselected keyboard map en-us
ERROR: CredSSP: Initialize failed, do you have correct kerberos tgt initialized ?
Failed to connect, CredSSP required by server.

Many people around Internet suggest disabling something on the server but it means disabling some security feature. Moreover, you might need to use RDP to disable this (ZeroDivisionError) and you may not be allowed to do so. Anyway, shitty answser.

Here is the proper one: https://github.com/FreeRDP/FreeRDP

This client just works but has the same issue as rdesktop: it’s highly stupid. For instance, look at the error message above and notice “Autoselected keyboard map en-us”.
Sorry, what ? It’s not because I’m using en_US locale that I’m actually staying in the United States and using a regular ANSI QWERTY keyboard. In fact, I’m not, not at all.
Another issue is the screen size setting which seems to be always set to 1024×768 which is a pitty nowadays, everybody uses at least “FullHD” screen.

So I made a shell wrapper script implementing dynamic screen size selection to 90% of your current display (configurable) and setting the right keymap according to your keyboard layout and variant (layout=ch, variant=fr for me, which is a french oriented QWERTZU layout used in Luxembourg and called by Windows “Swiss French”).

It also feature a configuration file to override defaults and some handy default options to share clipboard and home disk with the remote target. All you have to do is to put saner-xfreerdp in /usr/local/bin/ and use it instead of the real binary.

Get the script here: https://github.com/eLvErDe/saner-xfreerdp

Here is an very simple usage example:

user@host:~$ saner-xfreerdp -u username -a some-srv-01.domain.lan
INFO: Detected active screen on monitor DVI-0 with width=1920 and height=1200
INFO: Will use resized resolution of 1728×1080

INFO: Running xfreerdp +clipboard +home-drive /u:”username” /v:”some-srv-01.domain.lan” /kbd:”Swiss French” /w:1728 /h:1080

[xrdp logs…]
Password:

You just set up a new test that was running perfectly fine when ran by hand but fails completely after integration in the monitoring software ?
Of course, you suspect that the actually run command in invalid, thanks to parameters, quotes, escapes or whatever but you’re having hard time to figure out what was run exactly…

Been there, done that. But here’s a magic trick:
Let’s do some kind of “ps | tail -f | grep” on the monitoring poller itself:

while true; do ps aux | grep check_script_name | grep -v grep; done

Now, trigger a forced check and get the full command on your terminal.
Some quotes might be missing because ps aux doesn’t show the argument separator but I guess that could be workarounded with a real script querying /proc/${pid}/cmdline that contains \0 arg separator…