Remote Desktop Project

February 28, 2018

This week I’ve been preparing the new staff XRDP service for user testing. It now has a quovadis SSL certificate and I’ve been attempting to resolve an issue with some clients presenting a warning dialogue about not trusting the certificate. According to this bug report it is necessary to include the whole trust chain in the certificate file. I’ve tried appending the contents of the .chain file without success, it’s not clear if I am missing a part of the chain, I’ll continue investigating but if we can’t easily resolve the issue we could just document what users should expect to see.

As Chris had access to a Windows machine he has managed to generate a .bmp image file for the login screen logo which actually displays correctly. I have no idea why the various Linux applications generated bad images but I’m not going to worry too much. This gives us a much more official-looking Informatics login screen which should reassure users. The image has been packaged up in an xrdp-logo-inf RPM.

I’ve also been investigating rate-limiting new connections using iptables. The standard dice iptables configuration is rather complicated so I need to speak to George about the best way to go about this.

To ensure the xrdp service only gets started once the machine is ready to handle connections I’ve modified the systemd config so that it waits for the LCFG stable target to be reached.

I’ve noticed that all the xrdp logs are being sent to the serial console. Even with just a single user that’s flooding our console logs so I’d like to get that stopped. It’s already going to local file and syslog so no more logging is really required. SEE don’t see the same problem so I wonder if it’s related to our Informatics syslog configuration.

The user documentation is now close to being complete, we even have some information on how to access the XRDP service from Android devices.


Remote Desktop Project

February 21, 2018

This week I’ve been working on the configuration for an XRDP server for Informatics staff. This will be publicised as a prototype service, the plan being to hold off replacing the NX service until Semester 2 is completed at the end of May, that avoids the potential for any disruption to teaching. The prototype service will be installed on some spare hardware which has 2 x 2.6GHz CPU, 36GB RAM and 146GB disk space, that’s not huge but should be sufficient for multiple users to be logged in simultaneously. As the staff service is likely to only ever be based on a single server I’ve decided to simplify the config by dropping the haproxy frontend, that will now only be used on the multi-host general service. To protect from DoS attacks iptables will be used to do rate-limiting. If I can work out how to get the xrdp software to log the IP address for failed logins I will also investigate using fail2ban to add firewall rules. Most of the user documentation on computing.help is now ready, I just need to add some instructions and screenshots for the Remmina client on Linux.