RDP via port redirection in XP

[starrick]

Any mention of Windows XP bellow is Professional, not Home.

Previous to moving to windows XP on my work desktop I was able to use SSH to redirect ports to systems at a remote location. I would then create an RDP connection profile that connected to localhost (also tried 127.0.0.1 and the actual IP address of the NIC) on the forwarded port and be connected to the remote host.

example:
client A redirects port 3390, via ssh to server B, to server C on port 3389.

When using windows XP I now get the following message:

"The client could not connect. You are already connected to the console of this computer. A new console session cannot be established."

I've tried all the combinations I can come up with, and it definitely appears that the client is looking at the host without paying attention to tha alternate port setting.

I have attempted to turn off the remote desktop access on my machine and this has no effect. I even just recently discovered that XP contains a "sessionname" variable that is set to "console". I attempted to change that value, without any luck.

Anyone have any ideas, or run into this before?

Thanks for your help.

 

[starrick]

Thanks to the folks at bitvise for providing this solution on their site.

http://www.bitvise.com/remote-desktop.html

Connecting to Localhost on Windows XP

The Remote Desktop client on Windows XP explicitly prevents the user from connecting to localhost, which makes it difficult to connect through an SSH2 client that is running on the same machine as the Remote Desktop client. However, there is a way around this limitation. In your \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 directory, locate the files mstsc.exe and mstscax.dll, and move them to another directory. This will enable you to run the Remote Desktop client in Windows 98 compatibility mode. You can reach the relevant settings by right-clicking on mstsc.exe in its new location, and selecting Properties > Compatibility. When the program is run in Windows 98 compatibility mode, it does not appear to protest when connecting to the local machine.

Note that, in the 'Computer' field of the initial RDC dialog box, you can also enter a port number - for example, 'localhost:999'. This is useful if you need to setup the SSH2 client to listen on a port other than 3389, for instance if port 3389 is already taken by the local Remote Desktop server.