I am looking for a remote desktop protocol to remote into a Linux workstation (it will be a VM on Hyper-V) to perform administration tasks from.
Normally I would use Windows and RDP, however budgets/licensing is restricting. I have a multi-monitor setup that I want to connect to a remote Linux workstation with. Windows and RDP does this fantastically, however I can’t seem to find an equivalent for Linux.
Do you need the gui?
If not may I interest you in Cockpit?
Oops, my post wasn’t clear. The VM I want to remote desktop into is to be my on-site workstation that I can administrate servers from. GUI is necessary so I can easily open multiple terminal windows, web-browsers, and other tools from the context of being onsite.
Ok, but you can install xrdp on GNU/Linux and connect from your Windows host to your local Linux VM using the built-in Windows Remote Desktop program.
I use arp -a command to find the IP of Hyper-V virtual machines.
xrdp works for sure with Gnome on X11, haven’t tried any other DE/WM.
SSH with Tmux for the many terminal.
I don’t know why you’d need to google in a web browser at work network if you are planning to be remote 100%. If you need to access a work kb then you should use a VPN for that.
Because we use the CLI which is free. I’m not trying to like a elitist jerk here, but LInux admins don’t use GUI’s.
If your admin laptop runs windows then you can just open up powershell and ssh natively from there, or use something like PuTTY, to your linux server.
I feel like I am to normie trying to help this man to his gui.
ssh + xforwarding would let you send whatever GUI apps from the server to your local machine.
I use Remmina; it can do a couple protocols, RDP / VNC / SSH (not tried the RDP, so don’t know how well it works)
it might not be the best but works fine for me.
Bear in mind, streaming a live desktop might be laggy at higher colour depth
I use it to connect to Windows machines via RDP, and it gets a bit wonky if you need to connect to Windows 7, but otherwise I have no issues.
Also just wanted to through in xfreerdp. I’ve used it a few times and it was pretty configurable and easy to script, then I could get a full gui
Hi,
instead of using the host like a remote windows host, I would use it as a network layer jump host - if you want to go into that direction instead of leverage remote GUI.
ssh allows ProxyJump (-J) to be used, simply configure on .ssh/config for all remote-machine related hosts and be happy (will be even faster combining it with ControlMaster for the jump on-site workstation.
multiple ssh will give you multiple terminals, no need to have a remote GUI (eg. window manager + eg. VNC) in between
As (X-)agent-forwarding is slower and takes up more resources: Running the browser locally and using the power of port forwarding, or socksProxy (like proxychains (tool))
I can fully understand if your remote workstation is fully setup and ready to go (having DNS of endpoints, ssh config yada yada), that you want to use this directly, then I recommend using VNC.
Personally not trusting having VNC port public accessible, either
Some of the tools I use on-site are web apps and therefore I need a web-browser. Some of the servers are Windows servers, so I need a machine with an RDP client as well. I also need to connect to VM consoles, which I need a GUI for.
I do currently VPN in. I connect to a VPN, so that I have access to RDP into this workstation and that is about it. My VPN connection has access to very little on purpose.
Whilst most of my time is spent in the terminal as most of the servers are Linux-based and I use powershell for as much as I can on the Windows server, I don’t think I want to reach the achievement of becoming a real Linux admin. I would rather use Sublime or Visual Studio Code for script writing than VIM. I would rather use terminator’s panes and tabs instead of multiplexing with tmux.
I also like Remmina as an RDP client. It does work great, however I am looking for an RDP-like server to run on a Linux box.
Thanks though.
Thank you for the suggestions. Problem with VNC is it is screen sharing, so I can’t use multiple monitors from the context of the remote workstation.
I like xfreerdp too. I have written a couple scripts using yad to create a form for user input then use that to run xfreerdp.
Here’s an example:
Bash script for GUI user input for xfreerdp
Then I create .desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications/ for an application shortcut, so I can quickly and easily run it.
However, I am looking for an RDP-like server rather than an RDP client. Thanks anyway.
I already told you about xrdp 
Trying it out. Bare install just gives me a blank screen when I connect, so I have to perform some troubleshooting later when I have time.
Thank you.
Nope. You can proxy ports from a remote endpoint through ssh to a desired port on your local machine.
Example:
ssh -L 443:localhost:443 my-server.fqdn
And then a quick hostfiles hack:
127.0.0.1 localhost my-server.fqdn
Then go to https://my-server.fqdn in your web browser and it will load the resource. This is a clever way to get around having to RDP or open up an internal resource to the web.
Could you elaborate? Do you mean IMPI? That would make sense. Because unless you have a bastion host you should just be able to ssh directly to your servers.
By VM consoles I mean use the VM as if I had a keyboard, mouse and monitor attached. I use xfreerdp and the /vmconnect switch so I can see the video output of a VM on Hyper-V. This is necessary if I need to operate an installer from an ISO, for example.
That can be achieved using ssh -L as well.
I’d rather not add add an ssh command and hosts file edit to every action I do.
I think my take-away so far is to try and get xrdp working. If that is a no go, it seems the answer to my question is that there is no RDP server equivalent.