VMWare View Client & RDP idle disconnect

[TSher]

Hi,

I have a problem with the view client and RDP. The setup I want is to have a room of thin clients for students to logon to. The idea is to have the view client load up automatically when the thin client (XPe) boots up. I have done this and if the person logs off the VM or just closes the client down it automatically loads up again. So far so good. The problem is, if the view client is just sitting there and nobody is logging on or there is nobody in the room but the thin client is turned on, the view client automatically disconnects after 3 minutes and as I am running a script it will load back up again within 6 seconds, but all the thin clients doing this every 3 minutes is not ideal. Also because of this sometime the thin client needs to be actually turned off as some freeze up after 3 hours of constantly doing it. Once the person then sits down and logs in to the VM then there is no issue and the session will stay open all day, which is fine. But as soon as they logoff, the client automatically relaunches and then the 3 minute 'idle' timer seems to start.

I do not think this is a view client problem, but an RDP issue. I am hoping that somebody else has experienced this and has a solution. I have changed the settings for 'idle' within the VMWare GPO's as well as the standard GPO for XP under terminal services - sessions. But so far this has not worked.

I raised a support incident with VMWare who diagnosed the problem as a RDP issue and not the view client, which in one way was good for troubleshooting, but also not very good as they did not seem interested in helping to solve the problem any further, which means I cannot roll out the 600 thin clients I wanted to do. I would have thought as there technology relied upon RDP to function that they would support it, officially or unofficially. If I cannot solve this I will have to look at other solutions.

Thanking you in advance for any input you can give.

[Lee_Collison]

I have had this happen when the Session time out settings are set to expire to soon. If you click on Configuration then Global Settings, change the Session time out from 600 minutes to 9999999 minutes. There is no way to turn this off. If you believe this is a RDP issue try connecting directly to a virtual desktop using RDP from a thin client, do you get the same result?

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Lee Collison

VCP - Enterprise Desktop

[TSher]

Hi,

Thank you for your reply. I have tried this and it still disconnects at the vm login screen after 3 minutes. The VMWare support person basically asked me to use XP (Pro SP2) remote desktop connection and remote control another XP (Pro SP2) machine outside of VMWare altogether. I did this and I get the same issue. Once I have established a connection and just leave it at the windows logon prompt it disconnects at around 3 minutes, sometimes 2m 50s or 3m 10s but always around the 3 minutes. I have installed 2 fresh PC's with official Microsoft XP Pro SP2 and SP3 software downloaded from their site. I have hooked the NIC's up together using a crossover cable to eliminate everything else and I still get this issue. I believe it to be an RDP issue, it would have just been helpful if the VMWare support person could have offered more support in this area instead of basically saying it's not an issue with VMWare.

The thing I do not understand is nobody else seems to have this issue, I cannot be the only person that uses VMWare or remote desktop connection in this way, by that I mean leaving the view client or RDC logged in so it presents a logon box of the VM for the students to login to, also it seems to do this from the default configuration of a fresh install of XP.

Thanks again for trying to help.

[gentleps]

I recently came across a somewhat similar problem. I too have 100 or so thin clients running XPe w/sp3. My primary pool that these systems use is a terminal server. I had them autologon with a single users and use the shell replacement script that relaunches the view client after exit. View is set to a session timeout of 1440 minutes since the systems are rebooted automatically every 24 hours 2 hours before the clinic opens. Well the view clients were all set to use the same user name using the command line options. The idea was the users then logged in as their user name when the walked up to the computer and selected the pool and press connect. I have my reasons for doing it this way that I won't get into. This worked fine in testing and I didn't notice any problems. I then rolled out and found a whole bunch of problems. View apparently only lets a user maintain 1 view session at a time. When one computer attempts to logon it disconnects the other sessions. The View clients then all exit and relogon. Oh the problems this caused. The only solution I found was using an individual user/password to connect the view client as. so now I have 100 new users in my AD just for View client connects.

This literally happened on monday and I have not had a chance to contact support about the issue. I wanted to get the thing working and I knew what would make it work. I looked all over for a setting that would stop this from happening, but could not find one. I plan on placing a support call here soon.

The view manager log displays that there are multiple sessions for a user

has multiple (5) sessions in pool cn=terminal

I don't know if my issues is related to yours, but the way I figured it out was logging into one terminal server session from one thinclient, then logging in from a second thin client to the terminal server with a second windows user and it disconnected right away on the first thin client. Note this is done with differnt windows users names for connecting to terminal server, so its not a case of windows saying only one session per user. It appears to be View manager saying you can only be connected to a machine through view as user one time. So this may be unique to terminal server pools and not a desktop pool issue. Just something to maybe look for.

Paul

[gentleps]

Oh I see now... You have it auto connect to the pool waiting for the user using the -desktopname to autostart or soemthing? The timeout is a windows timeout. RDP login screen will only stay active for a short period of time. This is why I leave the view client active and don't tell it to autostart a pool. I don't know if you can change this timeout. A quick search doesn't bring anything up on the subject. I think the timeout is 2 minutes and is true for both RDP and console login. Try pressing ctrl-alt-del on any XP desktop that isn't logged in. You'll see the login goes away after 2 minutes of no input.

Paul

[TSher]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for your input. I have the client automatically connect to the pool, so when a student comes to sit down at the thin client it sits at the login screen, ready for them to login. This way, to them it looks and acts just like a normal xp pc and they do not get confused. It is definately an RDP issue as I have 2 x XP Pro machines, fresh installed and using Remote Desktop Connection only to the other XP PC I get the same issue. I would have thought it would be documented somewhere. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places.

I'm not sure what to do next as I cannot find anything about this problem in detail. There must be away to solve it.

Once again, thanks for the input.

[Lupem]

I just came across this issue. My issue, the VM it self sends a keep alive signal to the terminal to see if it is there continously. if there is a delay for a certain time, the channel will be disconnected. Found that the Symantec firewall was blocking the traffic to the terminal. make sure that that the security firewall being used allows all the necessary TCP and UDP ports required to connect from the servers to the terminals. I decided to remove the firewall that came with the terminal. Everything works without disconnecting.

[EXPRESS]

Hmm intresting.... I get the same issues and we use V10L's to connect to the VM's if the users is not logged on and a login prompt is present it too will disconnet in about three minutes I always thought it was an RDP issue but you seem to think it is an Symantec firewall? Has anyone else tried this as well?

Thank you,

Express

[Lupem]

It's any firewall. It is well documented in the VMWare support site.

[EXPRESS]

Lupem, thanks for this info... can you be so kind and share a link to the documentations?

Thank you,

Express

[EXPRESS]

Thank you,

Express

Message was edited by: EXPRESS

[EXPRESS]

Can you tell me where you removed the firewall that came with the terminal on the V10L?

Thank you,

Express

[EXPRESS]

Hey guys hate to be a PITA but does anyone else know of removing the firewall Lupem discusses above, I have tried looking online but I dont find it. I am really interested in doing this as well....

Thanks in advance.

Thank you,

Express

[Lupem]

Sorry, i don't check these threads after 5pm pacific time. I go home. V10L With the Linux OS does not come with a firewall. My Dell FX160 came with a firewall besides the windows one in the XPe. If you have the V10L, you have to check the switch on the ports the terminals and the VM servers are plugged into. If you have a firewall gateway of any kind between the Servers and the Terminals, you willl need to check that to. We have an internal one and an external one. If you have a smart switch, You have to open them up to.

You have to look at the event viewer in the VM itself around the time it disconnects to make sure. In the VM I get "Aborting channel on missing keep alive requests" 6 minutes later, the disconnect happens. it might be harder depending on what kind of VMs you are using if using composer or VM creation/destructin on the fly. i added the link below for the VMware link on the issue I had. Also has links on which firewall ports required.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=1012266&sl... 0 42070480

My V10Ls are using firmware V6.3.0.22. Version V6.3.0.11 screwed the hole thing. 6.2xxx had issues with printers. When you go to 6.3xxx you are forced to use an FTP server to load the WNOS.ini file everytime they turn on to get the right resolution. Did you buy the TCX licenses required to make the V10L run correctly? They have the USB, Multimedia, and rich sound licenses. They don't tell you they are required until AFTER youbuy the terminals and call them why the USB is slow, the Video really choppy. Let me know if you have any more questions.

[Lupem]

You also need to make sure the VMs have RDP 6.1 installed. Previous version had issues with connection stability and speed.