TuDra.net

RemoteDesktopManager 1.5 release

Daniel — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 22:55:48 +0000

I had a long time item on my todo list to fix the Discovery form. The previous version did not respect the netmask as it should. For example for a 255.255.254.0 mask it was scanning the complete 255.255.0.0 network.

The full releasenotes:

B: On Show click in tray menu, RDM was sent to front if already visible
B: If no domain is set a \ was added in front of username in MSTSC connect dialog
I: Improved netmask (read: will use the actual ip netmask) handling for RDP Discovery.

The new release can be downloaded at Sourceforge

RemoteDesktopManager 1.4 release

Daniel — Sun, 18 May 2008 10:44:25 +0000

Recently Microsoft updated it’s Remote Desktop Connection (also known as RDC or MSTSC). The RDP Protocol has been updated to version 6.1. The new version comes with Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista SP1 and Windows 2008 Server.

One of the changes they made is that /console is no longer there, instead /admin has to be used now to connect to the console session of a Windows 2003 or 2008 server.

The new RDM is compatible with the new RDC tool (as well as the older versions of course).

The full releasenotes:

I: RDP 6.1 compatibility (Vista SP1, Windows XP SP3, Windows 2008 Server).
I: Upgraded solution to Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition (build target set to .NET 2.0).
B: RDP Discovered hosts with multiple IP addresses (but resolving to the same name) are only added once.

The release can be downloaded at: Sourceforge.

Oh and btw, I did not skip versions 1.2 and 1.3 I just did not write a blog post about it.

VMWareControl

Daniel — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 07:52:58 +0000

Do you know the problem that the number of VMWare Server installations grows very rappidly? And that it is pretty annoying you can’t really easily switch from one host to the other?

Well I had that problem and decided to make a tool to manage all servers from within one tool. It is sort of a cheap-ass version of Virtual Center (you didn’t pay for VMWare Server why pay for the management tool).

The tool does require you have installed the Management Interface add-on (on Linux this is a separate installation, on windows server you need to have IIS installed).

Feature list:

easily configure list of vmware servers (use same login/password for all if you want)
print the server overview
list diskusage (not in the standard Management Interface)
open console from overview
start/suspend/stop images from overview
for the developer: great sample to see how webbrowsercontrol can be used.

Note that this version is NOT compatible with the upcoming 2.0 release.

Download setup: VMWareControl 0.2.1 setup
Download source: VMWareControl 0.2.1 src

VMWareCopy 0.3

Daniel — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 16:11:02 +0000

Fixed some minor issues and added two new features:

-start flag, if set image will be started after copy (has no effect if image was stopped by vmcopy tool).
NOOP thread. Will send the NOOP command to the FTP server every 5 minutes. This prevents server disconnects on long (e.g. writing directory XML) inactivity.

New version can be downloaded here: VMWareCopy 0.3

VMWareCopy

Daniel — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 19:57:19 +0000

VMWareCopy is a tool to backup VMWare images running on a MicrosoftWindows VMWare host. It’s designed to be used with VMWare Server andrequires a FTP server to backup the images to.The reason for FTP is simple: it’s way faster then a windows share.A quick sum of the features:

Stop the image before copy and resume it afterwards (uses VMWare VIX).
Write vmware image directory structure to file including file permissions.
Calculate file hashes/checksums of type MD5 and SHA1.
Verify the hash of an uploaded file (need support for SITE HASH command, currently available for Gene6 and SimpleFTP).
Option to skip copy if none of the files has the Archive bit set.

Just run VMWareCopy without arguments to see all the command line options.Download exe, scripts and source: VMWareCopy 0.2

SimpleFTP Server 0.2

Daniel — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 15:13:21 +0000

What is changed:

Uninstaller will first uninstall service.

Relative paths are send to the client (e.g. C:\Temp\mydir becomes /mydir).

Minor fixes.

For those who are interested. The server is based on LightFTPServer by Joel Pobar (http://callvirt.net/blog/). I used icons from the SilkIcons set by Mark James. Took some FileMonitor code from SathishVJ and basically copied the PasswordHash code from Jonathan Bailey.Downloads:SimpleFTP 0.2 Simple FTP Src 0.2

SimpleFTP Server

Daniel — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 00:01:47 +0000

I started working on a tool to copy VMWare images running on VMWare Server for Windows. The tool will stop an image if running, will gather various file info in an dir xml and copy it over FTP to a server. After the files are copied the MD5/SHA1 hashes from local and the remote FTP files are compared to make sure the data is written correctly.
But this post is not about the copy tool (will post on that one when it’s ready) but a simple FTP server. Sure there are enough servers around. I myself am very found of the Gene6 server. So why bother to write (not from scratch dough) a server? Well it’s fun to do, it’s free to use (most other feature complete servers will cost you) and it can easily be extended.

If you need a simple (free) server or like to play with C# this project may be of interrest to you. If you like a serious server I can recommend Gene6 FTP Server.
Download installer.
Download source.

Site Update

Daniel — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 13:51:15 +0000

Update to latest Wordpress and K2 theme. Also moved the site to a new server.

RemoteDesktopManager 1.1 release

Daniel — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 13:24:40 +0000

It’s bin a while since the last release. I incorporated the RDPDiscovery code so you can now have RDM discover all hosts in your LAN (depending on your netmask this might take some time).
The other new feature is an experimental trayicon. It allows you to connect to RDP servers from the tray menu. I added an option to minimize RDM to tray on exit.

Release notes:

N: Added LAN RDP Server discovery

N: Added trayicon for quick access to hosts

I: Ask to delete all child notes when deleting a non-empty group

B: Dublicate button did not copy all options

The release can be downloaded at: Sourceforge.

On a site-note: I did not implement all requested features (yet) and I know it’s time for an manual (not all options are intuitive enough to discover while using the application). So please stay tuned for the next release.

RDP Discovery

Daniel — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 17:16:52 +0000

I created a little tool to discover Windows machines on a local network with RDP/Remote Desktop enabled. This tool will be integrated in the next RemoteDesktopManager version.

Just run the tool. Let it discover all available machines, uncheck the ones you don’t want. Play with the RDP options available and hit save. Provide an location on disk and the tool will create standard RDP (mstsc compatible) files with the extra options used by RemoteDesktopManager.
If you want to use the files in RDM just select them, start RDM and drop the files on it.

Downloads: RDPDiscovery Exe, RDPDiscovery Source

For the curieus: I used the .NET Ping class to find-out if a machine is running and then try to open an socket on port 3389 to see if RDP is running. Without the use of the Ping class, you will only discover some hosts as Windows (from XP SP2) has some “security” feature build-in to block portscans.

Credits go to Ami Bar for the SmartThreadPool code I used.