Have you ever wondered why your Remote Desktop Connection on your Mac works well on one system but not on another?

I was testing out my connectivity to some of my customers’ network using Remote Desktop Connection on my MacBook Pro. This used to work on one of their environments but now it doesn’t. I was under the impression that there must be something that changed on my system. So I did a quick check but couldn’t find anything that has changed on my MacBook Pro (it simply means that I rely so much on VMs that my host machines – whether PC or Macs – don’t get changed that often.) What’s even more frustrating is that it works on one environment but not on another. This clearly means that there must be something that was changed on my customer’s environment.

After asking a bunch of questions, it appears that they have upgraded their server operating system from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2. Since Windows Server 2008 R2 is secure by default, some of the security policies in place may be preventing the Remote Desktop Connection for Mac client from establishing a connection. But here’s where my confusion lies. The error message does not tell me anything related to those security policies.

You were disconnected from the Windows-based computer because of problems during the licensing protocol.

I mean, seriously, how does that error message help me? The reason I ask is because I have configured a Windows Server 2008 R2 Terminal Services server in the past and I was able to connect from a MacBook using the Remote Desktop Connection for Mac client. Because I cannot do anything on the server to fix this issue, I decided to dig deeper (a.k.a do a Google search.) It seems that there are a lot of people who are experiencing this same issue. A very popular forum post regarding this issue is from Microsoft TechNet where the thread kept going for more than a year. Somebody pointed out a Microsoft KB article that outlines the steps that you need to do on the Terminal Server. As I mentioned, this is not the path that I can take unless I’m the server administrator. One thing did work for me: v2.1.2 of the Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection for Mac. I have searched for it on the Microsoft Download Center but could not find it anywhere. Technically, this is still an unsupported product so be aware that you might not get any help from Microsoft when using this. Install it on your Mac, run it and test your connectivity to a Windows Server 2008 (or higher) Terminal Server.

NOTE: Please remove the PDF file extension from the file after downloading.

When you configure your network cards to be bridged, Windows creates another network adapter which now acts as a router that routes traffic from one network adapter to the other. I saw that mine got disabled so I simply re-enabled it. Immediately after doing this, wireless network traffic started to work. I realized that the only thing I did in my Hyper-V environment before it happened was to install Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.  While searching for similar occurrences, I found this post on a forum but talks about a Windows Server 2008 R2 guest in a VirtualBox environment.

It’s something to watch out for when installing Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.

But my dilemma didn’t stop there. I obviously don’t want to access the internet via the Windows Server 2008 platform. That’s what my Windows XP virtual machine is for. So what I did was to add an Internal virtual network using Hyper-V’s Virtual Network Manager. This will create another network adapter on the host operating system – in this case, Windows Server 2008. I’ve renamed this WiFi-Guest-Bridge. Next, I’ve added a network adapter on the Hyper-V guest and mapped it to this virtual network. Once, I’ve done both of these, I’ve bridged the wireless network adapter and the WiFi-Guest-Bridge network adapter, thereby, providing wireless connectivity to my Hyper-V guest.

Keith Combs provided a step-by-step procedure (with screenshots) on how to configure wireless networking with Hyper-V guests in his blog

It is very important to name your network adapters accordingly as Windows does a real good job of using a generic naming convention (i.e. Local Area Network x) which adds confusion especially if you are dealing with a ton of virtual networks from within a single Hyper-V (or other virtualization) platform

relog PerfMonCounterLog.blg -f csv -o PerfMonCounterLog.csv

I was trying to find more about this tool from Microsoft TechNet but couldn’t find any (or maybe I wasn’t just looking hard enough) although MSDN has something about the method called ReLog which does exactly the same thing. It’s exposed as an API so you can call it from an application should you wish to do so

powercfg.exe /hibernate off

Now, if you happen to take a look at your system partition and show all the hidden files, you would see a hyberfil.sys file, a hidden system file located in the root folder of the system partition. The Windows Kernel Power Manager reserves this file when you install Microsoft Windows. The size of this file is approximately equal to the amount of RAM installed on the computer. Since we dont need hibernation on servers, you can just remove this file using the command above. Sometimes I wonder why everything is on the system partition when you don’t even need them

%WINDIR%System32Sysprep

One thing to note is that you need to check the Generalize checkbox to create a new SID for a cloned system