Mremoteng: Simulate keyboard or mouse move to avoid RDP session idle timeouts.

[johnwc]

Our overly controlling GPO admins have set the idle time on the servers to be 2 minutes. It would be a life saver if you could add a feature to make the RDP session look like it is active to keep the idle session timeout from kicking in and booting us off.

I mean seriously, we can't even run to the bathroom and back without losing whatever we were working on.
Maybe something similar how this guy was able to do it.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/345147/how-to-simulate-keybard-input-to-a-remote-desktop-session

[LIyoai]

I'm not sure this is a good feature. Because this is an organizational issue.
There are reasons for session limits.
If you add a feature to keep sessions alive this could cause problems and maybe a company forbids the usage of mremoteng.

[johnwc]

I figured I'd get a few nitpicking comments about it being a organizational issue. You obviously haven't worked in the industry professionally enough to know by now that there are people in high positions making decisions that they don't belong making. Like the one I pointed out above. When those decisions start affecting your ability to do your job, then you have no choice but to find ways to work around the issues.

I was in the middle of a upgrade for a sql server just yesterday to 2014. A colleague stopped by to pick my brain about a issue they where facing. As I was turned around talking to him, the connection timed out and kicked me off killing the upgrade in the middle of the process. The installation was ruined, we had to restore the entire server from backups. Did the GPO admins care? Nope.

I'm not asking for it to be a keep it active forever feature. I'm asking for it to be like a timeout option we can choose, with a max setting of let's say a hour maybe.

[Benchwork]

I have had the same problem in the past, I found and use a autohotkey script. I think you might find it to be better fit for your use. It also works well with other applications that have auto timeouts. I just have mRemoteNG lunch it after I connect to those servers.

[LIyoai]

Just wanted to start a discussion. Because keep alive forever would be a problem in my opinion and there are always users who want this.
If it is hard limited to to 1 hour like you mentioned it should be ok.

[sunny5055]

A very useful and long due feature. Hope to get it added soon..

[sunny5055]

@Benchwork can you send me link to the autohotkey script ?

[Benchwork]

sure thing. this is where I got my baseline for my script. however most of mine are setup to run about once a minute.
https://autohotkey.com/board/topic/120128-looping-script-to-move-the-mouse-up-and-down/

[johnwc]

The autohotkey does not solve the issue when you are on another app and mRemoteNG does not have focus. I use caffeine myself at home, and RDP still kicks in the lock screen with it.

[TheLeftMoose]

Hi

I had the same issue some time ago, and didn't manage to fix it via rdp.
Though installing a vnc server on each client and then using vnc instead
worked.

2017-03-26 7:59 GMT+02:00 John [e-mail]:

The autohotkey does not solve the issue when you are on another app and
mRemoteNG does not have focus. I use caffeine myself at home, and RDP still
kicks in the lock screen with it.

—
You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.
Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub
https://github.com/mRemoteNG/mRemoteNG/issues/405#issuecomment-289260638,
or mute the thread
https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAy9mN1OAAHn4ceH7KimUmgEZggP2epMks5rpf7SgaJpZM4MCTtK
.

--
\dennis

Best regards/Med venlig hilsen
Dennis Schwartz-Knap

Connect via LinkedIn:
http://dk.linkedin.com/in/schwartzknap

[Kahless2001]

It sounds to me like your GPO admin's don't understand these settings, or don't dogfood. I would suggest the following:

1: Find out who's brilliant idea these settings are
2: Find out if they really intend users to loose their work after two minutes.
3: If they really intend for you to loose work, Talk managment into making them use the same group of servers you are using. Better yet, get Managment using it. They will quickly realize the error in their ways.

Seriously though... I bet they are confused and think this "idle timeout" is just a screen saver kicking in (which is irritating enough with such a short time window) and don't really understand the impact they are having on you.

As a last resort.... buy or build a hardware mouse jiggler. You cant have SQL upgrades blowing up because of a stupid policy. Speaking of which... did you do a Root Cause Analysis and submit it to management for that SQL upgrade failure? I'm pretty sure that RCA would give you a great exibit A for why this policy needs changed. IT probally needs a special server with no timeouts for such activities, but "mere mortals" still have webex training and the like, which is going to either cause everybody to buy mouse jigglers, or just prevent them from doing their jobs.

Its best not to have policies so draconian that users are forced to find ways to circumvent them to do their jobs.

[johnwc]

Please see my comment above, you're preaching to the choir.

You can find out who made the decision all you want, in extremely large corporations your concern is not heard. Especially if they feel their decision is based on security concern they read from some trade journal.

And as for management actually admitting to having any kind of error in their ways... hahahahaha, sell tickets for that show cause I'll be buying!

[sparerd]

I don't think we will ever implement an official feature to do this. I think that by providing an official implementation, it would be an explicit stamp of approval by mRemoteNG as an organization. This might cause some organizations to view mRemoteNG in a negative light.

With that said, however... I'm not opposed to users creating this for themselves. I think this could be done as a 3rd party plugin, once we have a framework to do that (#976).

[kmscode]

Please keep it cordial folks. Thanks...

@johnwc as @sparerd mentioned in previous comments (and I completely agree with him), I don't feel that implementing this directly in mRemoteNG would be the best solution for the product itself. I have dealt with organizations that have blacklisted applications for less.

A plugin would be acceptable, but being as there's no ETA for #976 I did some additional research and found the following:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17525377/how-to-use-inputsimulator-to-simulate-specific-keys-on-remote-desktop

which links to http://www.pinvoke.net/default.aspx/user32.keybd_event that has some additional details/code.

While I haven't tested any of this, after a quick review it seems as if a simple c# console application could be written to send an innocuous key press every minute. You could then register that as an external tool, then right click on the session to kick it off. However, mRemoteNG would need to remain the focused window using this approach.

side note: 2 minute idle -> forced logout sounds painful - you haven't been able to lobby for a modest increase to 5 minutes? Depending on how far the walk to the restroom is, that should allow for a bio-break round trip.

[chaoscreater]

Just run this as an Autohotkey script. You can also convert this script to a .exe and run it without Autohotkey installed. To convert, just go into Autohotkey program files and find the compiler tool there.

#SingleInstance, force
#Persistent
;in milliseconds - so 30000 would be every 30 seconds
SetTimer, NoSleep, 240000
Return

NoSleep:
 DllCall( "SetThreadExecutionState", UInt,0x80000003 )
Return