Mac and RDP Issues

Bump

Basically java RDP is broken. Not F5's fault, blame Oracle and the ever changing requirements to try & shore up the security of the JVM's...

 

One of the biggest issues is that on the Mac, java RDP really really really wants to be able to resolve the hostname (Of the Mac) to an IP. It doesn't need to, and doesn't use it when it does, but if the resolution is NOT available, then java RDP just won't work.

 

To fix it, I usually make sure that the hostname is in the /etc/hosts file on the Mac. Then Java RDP should work (Unless you've found yet a other issue with it :)

 

There's other postings around here (From about 18 months - 2 years ago IIRC) where this was discussed for a bit until I finally stumbled over the answer while running with tracing enabled and judicious tcpdumps...

 

H

 

In a shell/terminal window, type

hostname

That'll return the hostname of the Mac... e.g.

bash-3.2 hostname
this-host.domain.com
bash-3.2

So in /etc/hosts, the easiest thing to do is to add that (this-host.domain.com) as an alias for localhost... So the line in /etc/hosts that currently reads

::1      localhost

should be changed to read

::1      localhost this-host.domain.com

The important thing is that whatever the hostname command returns needs to be in /etc/hosts to make it resolvable (Actually that's a little white lie... if you're somewhere that has the output from hostname resolvable already.. e.g. DHCP with DDNS) would work already.

You can test your entry by typing

ping `hostname`

The Backtick characters are important... If ping says it can't resolve the name, then /etc/hosts isn't correct.

H

What does the java console on the Mac say if you bump the log/tracing up to level 5

 

H

 

Oh!

 

You aren't behind a proxy are you? Check that the proxy settings for your JVM are set (Or not set) appropriately.

 

H