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.