gimme a (control-)break!

Out of TheOffice unexpectedly. TheOffice runs Windows systems and recently decided that VPN solutions should be replaced by a remote desktop gateway. Oh yeah. Back then I had made a quick try with xfreerdp. It was quite ugly to setup (especially because xfreerdp **wants** you to provide your password on the command line) but it did worked.

Couldn\’t get it to work again in my sick-on-Monday mode. So I tried to find something better with remmina. After re-installing the software from vendor repositories (rather than distro repositories, which I typically prefer) to get access to the gateway-support plugin I managed again to connect. It wasn\’t nice (256 colors by default), it wasn\’t fast, but it did the trick. But unfortunately, i clicked \”connect\” rather than \”save and connect\” and my setup got lost.

Unfortunately, I couldn\’t set it up right again.

So let\’s try xfreerdp again

let $WUSER be my \’THEOFFICE\\\\brosp\’ domain/user name à la windows
let $WACHINE be the name of my machine at the office w-brosp-hb.example.org
let $GATEWAY be the name of the gateway like thegateway.example.org
and let\’s say get_a_password is a shell function that will just read one line of text and return it without showing it on screen …

then

xfreerdp /u:$WUSER /p:$(get_a_password) /v:$WACHINE /g:$GATEWAY

did the trick.

It worked, it is nicer (i\’d say I got true colors) but just scrolling to the output of the console is a pain. Give me a SSH login **please**. My firth thought of \”yeah, I know, I\’m going to run a SSH server at home (hopefully I can get my public IP address quite easily nowadays, although it won\’t be the same everyday) and I\’ll setup a reverse tunnel from work. The firewall/NAT on the ISP box might not like that as much as I do, though. I\’ll have to tweak it to give my laptop a fixed IP, etc. That won\’t be for today, I\’m afraid.