scandals of an ITian

There had been an issue identified with XP Sp3 machines not being able to connect to remote machines within an SBS or EBS environment via Remote Web Workspace.

Some classic signs of the issue and various options that I had tried out in vain

1. When you click connect to your default remote machines the following box pops up

   

2. When following the error message and various steps available online to enable the add-on you don’t get to view the add-on in the first place.

   

3. You could also follow the procedure of deleting a few registry keys that would enable you to view the add-on from the manage add-ons from IE

   

4. You add the website to your trusted lists and it still doesn’t connect
5. There are scripts available that are used to install the RDP 6.1 ActiveX
6. @markstan helped me out heaps and we even tried this solution
7. After all my nagging I think @markstan went on vacation because of me as seen from his tweet

   

8. Another thing I had noticed was the clean untouched XP SP3 VM that I build and manually updated with IE8 and latest updates didn’t seem to suffer from this.

So I setup the calendar appointments with my 4 users that had this issue to bring their different laptops back to the office. These guys are teleworkers and only come in couple of times a month to the office. So you could probably understand their frustration and of course mine.

But then on 27^th October the RDP Gods decided to take pity on me and sent message via @nathanm with this tweet

All my test machines were powered up, installed RDP 7 from here and life returned back to normality.

The ActiveX issue was fixed and I had a couple of happy EBS RWW users going home in less than 20 minutes.