Toshiba g900, WM6 and RDP

Recently I got mad and spent all my savings and some more (I know, those were not impressive savings but still...) and bought myself a Toshiba g900 smartphone/pocket pc. There are lots of tests and reviews of it over the network so I won't write another here - it's nice and efficient and that is all. But I will write something about the first problem I got with it. Generally I bought it because I am LWA and do not want to carry my laptop computer everywhere when I am on stand-by duty. I thought, since most of the emergency work on my servers requires only some investigation and two or three clicks on RDP, all I need some portable RDP client. I also thought that if I buy a Windows powered device this client should be there so it should solve most of my problems. So I bought this Toshiba with shiny Windows Mobile 6 and WVGA display (800x480) which is only 3" but with such resolution should work. And it worked all right but... there was no RDP client installed! WTF? I have checked with friends (of course almost everyone have his PDA almost a year now, I am the last one as usually :-)) and every mobile device I have checked had RDP as a standard. But... on Windows Mobile 5. My WM6 is the first one in the neighborhood... I have Googled the problem and it seams it is kind of standard for vendors to provide WM6 without RDP client. Apparently some of them do install it, but most of them don't. I wanted to download the client from Microsoft. Well, if you know how to do it let me know... So looked a little further and found RDP client for WME somewhere else - here. It works fine. But why couldn't I get it form M$ or with my system at the first place?

But there is something really good in the end. When we tested the RDP client on WM5 we bumped onto a problem - it would not allow us to use any other port than default one. I mean you could not enter the IP:port in its dialog since the client software claimed that such address is not valid. And I need it especially that I had to access some of my servers through SSH tunnel. Fortunately RDP client on WM6 does not have this limitation and you can use it to connect to for example 127.0.0.1:4000. Which is quite useful since for example Putty for WM let's you create tunnels from local ports to external servers:ports just like the standard PC version do and miraculously it works! Now I can create SSH session to my secure access server, create a tunnel from 127.0.0.1:something on my WM to some_server_ip:3389 and then start RDP session to 127.0.0.1:something and voila! I am in. That was why I bought it in the first place and I am really glad it can be done :-). Should have checked it before buying of course but the amount of information you can get about this type of problems is quite low and hard to find...

Ah! Should you need Putty for pocket pc it's here.

Did you know?

An interesting feature quite useful in everyday work: I am using Ubuntu as my secondary desktop and it is quite heavily loaded. So sometimes it freezes, I mean the X windows becoming unresposive. Sometimes I can not even close the X server or switch to console. The hard reset was my only option in such situations since today. Today someone showed me the neat keyboard trick. Looks like this keyboard commands are serviced on pretty low level and they work in situations like this. It's enough to: hold ALT + SysRq and press s (that will sync your disks), then hold ALT + SysRq and press u (which will umount your disks) and then finally hold ALT + SysRq and press b (which should the reboot your system). Did you know? I didn't so I am writing it down for further reference.

Another ambiguous problem – Network Service (SYSYTEM Account) locale...

Recently one of our customers decided he want another application server for his farm. He already have several of those based on W2k3 but we could not just clone it since the hardware platform was "a little" different from the rest of his machines. So we have installed it and configured it basically the same way as the previous ones and have installed client’s ASP.NET application on it. Everything was all right, well, almost everything… We live in Poland so the client wanted to have Polish localization on his server. That’s of course not a problem. But he also wanted the SYSTEM account, particularly Network Service profile to also run in Polish since his application could not manage to successfully perform searches etc. when there were our neat special Polish language characters in user input. So we have changed it in Control Panel|Regional and Language Options in this dialog:



We took care to change everything to Polish on the next to tabs:



What could be easier? Then we also checked the Apply all settings to current user account and to default user profile since we needed this for Network Service profile specifically. The dialog that W2k3 shows when you check this box explains everything:



So we restarted the whole machine and then happy and satisfied with our prompt service we notified customer about successful completion of his order.

But he was not satisfied at all since that did not changed anything… Don’t ask why - I do not know. We have four another machines where there were no problems with this settings, everything including Windows dialogs suggested that it should work but the customer were right - it didn’t. So we started to search and eventually found the LWA solution. We have located the place where W2k3 stores locale information for the SYSTEM profiles (System profile (S-1-5-18), Network Service profile (S-1-5-20), Local Service profile (S-1-5-19)) which is of course here - [HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-XX\Control Panel\International] and check for the differences between machines who worked all right and the one who did not. There were differences so we have just copy this information over from the good one. We also have copied the [HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-19\Control Panel\International\Geo] just to be sure. And voila! - after the restart it works. Why it did not changed the Microsoft interface way? As I mentioned before I don’t know. Well, solution worked :-).