Monday, October 23, 2006

Going a bit further with Remote Desktop

Phil Haack pointed us all to a blog entry by Steven Harman, which shows how to automagically map your remote drives to your remote desktop connected computer.  I'll go one step further.

Let's say you're remote desktopped into Machine A.  You are all super cool, now that you've read Steven's blog post, so you have easy access to your local computer's hard drive.

But, let's say you need to remote desktop into machine B, which you can only do from machine A (due to network limitations).

How do you map your local machine's hard drives all the way through to machine B?

It's simple, actually.  On machine A, in your remote desktop window, map a network drive to \\tsclient\c (if the c drive is the one you want mapped).

That drive should show up with a letter now, probably close to 'Z', unless you changed it during the mapping.

Now, if you remote into machine B, after following Steven's advice, you'll see a drive similar to 'Z on TSClient'.  That drive is actually the hard drive of your local machine, visible to both machines A and B.

Take note, however, that file operations to your local drive through a daisy-chained Remote Desktop connection will be noticeably slower than usual.

6 comments:

kontiky said...

>>>file operations to your local drive through a daisy-chained Remote Desktop connection will be noticeably slower than usual.
really, yes.
but how it can be make faster?

Anonymous said...

map the client drive letter to a drive letter
open a command prompt
xcopy [source] [destination]

This by passes all of the gui updating and loading the file binary into the RDP clipboard.

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Unknown said...

You might be interested in RHUB http://www.rhubcom.com remote access for your Remote Desktop needs. It has some great features such as instant remote control, remote reboot, remote reconnection, remote desktop monitoring, firewall and proxy-compliance, file transfer, and lockdown system compatibility, among others.

Mike Frizzi said...

Will this work with remote desktop software, or is only for connections made using Windows built-in connectivity? I had to move past what Windows offers a while ago because of its unreliability and overall difficult to penetrate set-up.

Cullen Waters said...

@Brad: I'm not sure. i've never used that software. If the software allows you to map local drives, though, it should work.