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Shadow RDS Sessions directly from dashboard


When monitoring a lot of terminal-servers based on Windows 2012r2 or 2016 RDS deployments, it would be really timesaving to be able to shadow active sessions shown in the Dashboard Tab by right-clicking the session to shadow.

 

It would be even nicer to have a dropdown submenu on the contextmenu-items

to select options like /Control and/or /noConsentPrompt.

 

Commandline in the background should than look someting like:

MSTSC /v:servername /shadow:sessionid (/control) (/noConsentPrompt)




2 people like this idea

btw `/Control` should be by default ticked off when adding to shadow menu, make sense when you want to shadowing a session, usually you want them to view only mode, not controlling

Thanks for the feedback, Kevin. I have implemented a "Control" option (which is off by default).

If yo turn "Control" of by Default, could a setting for defaults be implemented so one can control the default behavior if one desire to use Control or the other switches differently as others.

We would for example always use the Control Option enabled

Hi Patrick,


providing a default setting UI for this option is a bit more effort. May I kindly ask you to create a dedicated feature request for that in order to track demand for this particular feature?


Thanks,
Stefan

Hi all,


I just finished my Powershell script for shadowing and now it is implemented in version 6 ... :)

But one problem we have is the current user session the mstsc.exe is running in. All people from IT have normal windows domain users, no special rights on domain, computers, servers etc. For administrative work we are using individual admin accounts. In my script, I start mstsc with my admin account and can connect without the /prompt parameters. With the new shadowing option in RoyalTS, my current logged on user is used and I cannot connect. For sure it is possible with /prompt parameter but then I have to put in my admin credentials each time I connect to a computer. Would it be possible to start mstsc with the credentials configured in the RDP connection? Even better, use the configured credentials from the RDP connection.

Hi Timo,


as far as I know, mstsc.exe doesn't allow to pass on credentials via command line arguments. Or am I missing something?


Regards,
Stefan

Hi @Stefan

Thanks for the updates, it's working great so far, nice job!

I would like to ask why using royal ts remote rdp it's a little bit slower than the native builtin mstsc? Not that obvious but very subtle slow. 

Thanks

Hi Kevin,


this can have different reasons. Mstsc may have different default values which may affect performance. I also should note, that Royal TS is hosting multiple instances of the RDP ActiveX controls in a single process and they all share a single UI thread. When multiple connections are "drawing" on the UI thread, it's busier in Royal TS compared to have multiple mstsc.exe processes where each has its own UI thread.


Regards,
Stefan

Can someone show me how to create a shadow terminal session?  I don't seem to be doing it correctly....

I'm testing by having an MSTSC session open on my machine, as well as one in royalts, as the same user.  When I look at the dashboard, and try to execute a shadow session, with the noconsentprompt, nothing happens.  What am I doing wrong?

Hi Neil,


hard to tell. Can you try to invoke a shadow session manually from the command prompt. Maybe you can see something in the output which points to the issue.


Regards,
Stefan

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