Remote Desktop from Linux to Computer that Requires Network Level Authentication

Question

Is there a way to use rdesktop or another Linux client to connect to a server that requires Network Level Authentication?

From Windows Server 2008 R2 -- Control Panel -- System And Security -- System -- Allow Remote Access there is an option that says "Allow connections only from computers running Remote Desktop with Network Level Authentication". So with this enabled I can con not connect from Linux. I can connect from XP but you need SP3 and I had to edit a couple of things in the registry for it to work.

Solution 1

FreeRDP (a spin-off from rdesktop) supports this in recent versions.

Solution 2

Sadly, I dont know if you are going to have much luck. I had to disable NLA to get our linux thinclients to connect when I was setting this up a year ago as I could not find any support for it in linux

Looking on sourceforge for rdesktop I see a feature request for it that is still open and some posts from 2009 with people asking for support.

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1773895&group_id=24366&atid=381350

Solution 3

Remmina which appears to be FreeRDP-based, negotiates the right settings (for me, connecting to a Windows 7 machine which requires NLA) out of the box.

Comments

[Philip]

+1, NLA only works with MSTSC 6+ on Win 6.0+

[Zoredache]

+1. Agree, it isn't supported. Also keep in mind that rdesktop will not support redirection by a connection broker. All round rdesktop is pretty broke when combined with windows 2008

[Deb]

Yes. The amount of pain being felt by the 'administering windows from linux' crowd is getting to the point that someone may actually Do Something About It.

[Will Dixon]

@sysadmin1138 It's also keeping a lot of people on XP/Server 2003; Microsoft don't realise that they're losing sales by changing their technologies.

[Deb]

I did a git pull from the stable repo this morning, and found it had NLA support now.

[ldsandon]

@Andrew: are you saying Microsoft is losing sales by making its products more secure? If Linux can't keep up with Windows is not a Microsoft issue. Basically it is as if a Windows sysadmin would ask to use telnet instead SSH to manage a server because Windows has no built-in SSH client.

[müzso]

Anna Martynova reported in April that rdesktop v1.7.0 did not solve the problems of connecting through a Windows 2008 R2 session broker for her. See the message in the archive of the rdesktop-devel mailing list: sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=27907218

[sinni800]

@ChrisS It works on XP (5.1) through a very small and easy registry hack.

[Philip]

@sinni800, yes, the registry hack to load the CredSSP provider "works" for very liberal and prone to failure definitions of "works". For an admin or poweruser it might be an option, but for normal users and especially non-company controlled hardware it's straight out.

[harijay]

It works very well on Ubuntu 13.10. I too pulled from the repository on github. Made a directory called build inside the root directory. Did a cd into build . Ran a "cmake .." followed by a "make" then a "make install" . I was then able to seemlessly rdp using a command " /usr/local/bin/xfreerdp -u hari.lastname 10.0.150.1" It worked flawlessly with the Network Level authentication.