Connecting to a TLS/SSL enabled Windows Terminal Server from Linux

I recently had to change my terminal servers to use an SSL certificate to prevent Man-In-The-Middle RDP attacks. This made my previous Linux RDP clients, rdesktop 1.6.0 and krdc, no longer able to connect to the terminal server. After much googling, I found remmina, installed and tested and it works to connect to an SSL-only Windows 2003 Terminal Server.

Connecting to a Windows computer from Linux

If you run Linux and need to connect to a Windows computer by name and do not have a domain controller or static IPs, then you may need to use nmblookup to find the IP address and then connect to that.

Example:
mount -t cifs \\server\share share
might give you
"mount error: could not resolve address for server: No address associated with hostname"

However, if you look up the name using nmblookup, you could get the address:

nmblookup server
querying server on 192.168.0.255
192.168.0.182 server<00>

So then you can get to it by IP address instead of hostname:

mount -t cifs \\192.168.0.182\share share

You can do the same with rdesktop:

rdesktop server
ERROR: getaddrinfo: Name or service not known

rdesktop 192.168.0.182
(connects)

As a general rule, if you find you frequently have to do something, it can be useful to write a script to speed it up.

For remote desktop, I use the following as "rdp.sh":

rdesktop -g 1250x925 `nmblookup $1 | sed -e 's/querying //g' -e 's/on 192.168.0.255//g' -e 's/<00>//g' -e s/$1//g -e 's/ //g'`

the $1 says use the first variable after the script, the sed line clears everything except the IP address, the `` causes it to be executed first, and the -g variable is so it fits best on my screen.

So, to connect to server, I run:

rdp.sh server

I welcome comments, complaints, and suggestions.