Knoppix + rdesktop as ts-client, licensing?

[Gerhard Hofmann]

Hi all,

we have a Win-2000-terminal-server running in application server mode.
We want to use some old PCs as RDP client. We think about taking the
hard disks out of the PCs and booting Knoppix from CD, using rdesktop
1.3 which is included in Knoppix.

Firsts tests worked fine, but there seems to be one problem: the
terminal server only applies 90-day-license to the Knoppix client. It's
quite obvious that a TS-CAL can't be stored on a machine that has no
harddisk, right? Has anybody else ever used Knoppix + rdesktop and found
a solution for licensing issues. Maybe it would be possible to store the
license on a floppy disk?

I know that in older versions of rdesktop there was a switch --built-in-
license so the rdesktop client emulated a Win-2000-workstation. Of
coures, that would "technically" solve the problem, but this would be a
license violation. For this reason, the switch was removed in newer
versions.

Regards
Gerhard

 

[Matthew Harris [MVP]]

Hmm...so everytime this client connects it is being given
out a new 90-day license from the license server?

Is the r-desktop client beign used the latest version?

-M

 

[Gerhard Hofmann]

Hmm...so everytime this client connects it is being given
out a new 90-day license from the license server?

Is the r-desktop client beign used the latest version?

-M

No, not every time. On the second connect, it uses the temp license that
was assigned on first connect. So I suppose, the client won't be able to
connect after 90 days.

As a workaround I could use rdesktop's "-n hostname" switch which will
explicitely set / change the client's hostname. Changing hostname from
time to time could be a workaround because new hostname means new temp
license.

rdesktop version is 1.3, that means up-to-date

I read somewhere else that Windows 2000 terminal servers store TS-CALs
for non-Windows clients on the server side? Is that true?

Regards
Gerhard