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Go with rdesktop!
Authored by: toupsie on Mar 15, '05 09:12:25PM
I manage 80 or so Windows 2000 & Windows 2003 Servers with my Mac OS X box (much to my CIO's annoyance). Instead of using Microsoft RDC for Mac, I compiled rdesktop and launch sessions with shell scripts. All you need to do is make sure you have X11 and the X11 SDK installed. Then download the latest tarball from rdesktop.org. Here is an example script that will do all the dirty work for you.

#!/bin/sh
curl -O http://unc.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/rdesktop/rdesktop-1.4.0.tar.gz
tar -zxvf rdesktop-1.4.0.tar.gz
cd rdesktop-1.4.0
./configure
make
sudo make install
Once you have rdesktop installed, then you can start writing little shell scripts to launch you RDC sessions from xterm or iTerm (my fav) after launching X11.

#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/rdesktop -u username -d domain -a 16 -g 1024x768  server.ip.address.or.fqdn &
This little script will launch a RDC session at 1024x768 & 65k colors, put your login name and domain name in the MSGina winlogon. You can add "-p password" but since these are clear text shell scripts, you will create a security issue and Windows already is insecure enough without your Mac adding to the problem. If you want to connect to the console of the Windows Server or XP box, use "-0" in the command. The nice part of using scripts is that you can launch a bunch of sessions quickly -- faster than you can do in Windows RDC or Mac RDC!

The one big caveat with using rdesktop so far for me has been the clipboard. You can copy info from rdesktop to the mac but not back. I found a work around using gedit. You paste your mac text into gedit, highlight it, copy it again then you are able to paste it in your Windows session.

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