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Mar
01

Tunneling RDP over SSH with the version 6 RDP Client

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I regularly use SSH to connect to customer systems and tunnel various different sorts of traffic through it (Telnet, ODBC, RDP etc). In certain cases, I have no other method of remote access to systems other than SSH.

This has not been a problem until I recently upgraded to Windows Vista which includes remote desktop connection v6, which will not allow connections to 127.0.0.1 on any port, it complains with the error message:

“The client could not connect. You are already connected to the console of this computer. A new console session cannot be established”

Which of course is true, if I were trying to connect to 3389.

So today after spending significant effort in the last couple of months I have found a simple solution to the problem:

  • Instruct your SSH client to listen on all interfaces for connections. For command line this means adding “-g” to your connection. I am using putty so ticking the box that says “local ports accept connections from other hosts” under Connection/SSH/Tunnels will do the job.

    • Putty

  • In the remote desktop client use 127.0.0.2 as the destination host and it will then happily pass through any tunnels you have created. For example 127.0.0.2:3390

    • I realize there probably are not that many people out there using SSH to tunnel RDP, but if you are then RDP 6 has been a real pain until now.

    Categories : How To, Technical Posts

    Comments

    1. polgara370 says:
      April 7, 2007 at 1:30 am

      Thank you so much! You don’t know how many hours I spent combing the internet for a solution. I had submitted the problem to our syadmin and either they were ignoring me or couldn’t figure out the problem either.

    2. Eskimo says:
      April 13, 2007 at 6:27 am

      Finally something that works, TY. There was another approach like this but that gave me the idea to use L127.0.0.2:3389 which didn’t work. And the compability mode approaches were just plain non-working (as they required so many other files too).

    3. holdtotherod says:
      September 10, 2007 at 7:40 am

      Thanks a bunch. I had a hard time figuring this one out as well. I originally was connecting using the old version of RDP Client (from XP) and it was working, but when I tried connection using RDP 6 I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. Once I did, I looked for a solution, and yours was by far the most straight forward and easiest of the solutions. Thanks again.

    4. tb says:
      April 14, 2008 at 9:01 pm

      Thanks, really needed that.
      Yet another reason to hate Microsoft.

    5. Brian says:
      March 2, 2009 at 10:42 am

      Thank you for this info. Yours was the first I came across with reference to localhost problems on Vista that worked.

    6. John says:
      July 10, 2009 at 9:11 am

      Excellent article, the only reference I found to this issue that was understandable enough for someone new to RDC and SSH to be able to figure out.

    7. Alex says:
      January 11, 2010 at 4:18 pm

      Hi m8. Thx for the tip. I was going to jump out of the WINDOW ! and you saved my day. I am not using the crap in real but only in VMs and only because I have to (My job does require that !) Everyone, go get a Mac and run OSX. If you ain’t got the money, then switch to Unix/Linux and Co.

      I am really angry because of the fact that one should pay so much for the Windows and then, still waste hours of the precious life to solve such issues.

    8. Norb says:
      March 20, 2010 at 1:02 pm

      This works fine, thanks a lot! You saved my day! :D

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