Hi,

a while ago i wrote a paper on how to tunnel terminal services through a ssh (secure shell) connection.

this solution had one problem –

it was required on the client side to connect with the Remote Desktop Client to localhost – but that isn’t possible under Windows XP (and i didn’t notice that at first because i only tested it on a client which had W2K3 installed).

As i have Windows XP on my laptop this bugged me because it is really a neat solution (more on that later) and i couldn’t use it while being on the road.

Today i found an interesting document on that topic and a rather obscure (but working solution).

1. Copy mstsc.exe and msctax.dll to another folder – i copied mine to etctools. These files were (in my case) under Program FilesRemote Desktop. That’s because i installed the RD Client from the Windows 2003 CD
2. Go to the properties of mstsc.exe and set a compatibility level of Windows 98
3. That’s it. Now you can connect to 127.0.0.1 with that “modified” version of mstsc.exe. Even “127.0.0.1:4000” is working – in case you set up the local forwarder port to 4000 (or something different than 3389)

I don’t have the foggiest notion of what this compatibility setting does. but it does work.

The original (german) paper can be found here.