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.

Get-VM | Export-VM -Path "F:VirtualMachines"

That command exports all of the Hyper-V virtual machines from my old laptop and copy them to the external hard drive. After plugging in the external hard drive to the new laptop, I copied the entire folder to the D: drive. Once the copy process was completed, I imported all of the virtual machines into Hyper-V.

PS D:VirtualMachines> Get-ChildItem -recurse *.xml | Import-VM

Pretty slick especially when you’re dealing with several Hyper-V 3.0 virtual machines that you need to copy from one machine to another. And, as always, the simplicity of a one-liner command is what I use to convince IT administrators to start playing around with Windows PowerShell. Exporting and importing my Hyper-V virtual machines only took less than 20 minutes.

I’ve been waiting for Windows Server 2012 to be released so I can try it out on my test environment. I already have Windows 8 installed on my test workstation but I wasn’t using it that much as compared to my Windows Server machine. I took that plunge last weekend and upgraded my Windows Server 2008 R2 machine to Windows Server 2012. The first thing that I needed to do was to test the Cisco VPN client. After reinstalling the Cisco VPN client, I tested connectivity to our internal network. Unfortunately, I hit an error message that looks something like this

Secure VPN Connection terminated locally by the Client.

Reason 442: failed to enable Virtual Adapter

Poking around the Windows Event Log, I found this error message

The application (Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client, from vendor Cisco) has the following problem: To function properly, Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client must be reinstalled after you upgrade Windows.

Now, I just did a reinstallation so I’m sure this wasn’t going to be a resolution. After a quick search using the keywords “Cisco VPN Client Windows 8” I saw this forum thread about a bug in the Cisco VPN client. All that is needed to make it work was to change some registry keys. On my Windows Server 2012 installation, the registry key is

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesCVirtA

If you look at the DisplayName key value, you may see some weird characters that have been inserted at the beginning of the line.

@oem8.inf,%CVirtA_Desc%;Cisco Systems VPN Adapter for 64-bit Windows

Simply remove the weird characters and try connecting to your VPN client. I’m guessing it’s the same for Windows 8 but I haven’t tried yet. I’ll install the Cisco VPN client on my Windows 8 workstation and see if I hit the same bug.