Remote Desktop with RDP

We provide a Remote Desktop Service based on the RDP protocol. This service can be reached under rdp.cip.ifi.lmu.de. On Linux systems you can use xfreerdp or xrdp as a client. On Windows systems you can use the onboard Remote Desktop Client. RDP clients are available for a wide variety of other platforms. When you use this service you will always be provided with a XFCE Desktop Environment. We hope to have found a sustainable and performant solution with RDP.

With this service you can work from home or anywhere else in the world as if you were sitting directly in front of a CIP-Pool Workstation. Due to security reasons you need to activate your access to remote services with the appropriate CipConf form.

Two things need to be remembered. Firstly the RDP Servers follow our normal once weekly reboot cycle. A suspended session does not survive a reboot. Secondly several servers hide behind the DNS name rdp.cip.ifi.lmu.de. New sessions are assigned to a random server. The server suspends your session in case of a network connection loss or your PC crashing. To resume your session you can not simply connect to rdp.cip.ifi.lmu.de again as that would send you to an new randomly choosen server. You need to connect to the real DNS name of the server your session is on instead. Attention: suspended sessions will be automatically closed after one hour.

Please do not use the real names of the servers for connections if you do not need to resume a suspended session because the load balancing provided by the random allocation of sessions to servers is essential for a continous opperation of this service.

Usage Note

Newer versions of Windows and the DNS resolvers of some providers have regrettably made the use of RoundRobin DNS for load balancing very difficult. This causes some users to allways connect to the same RDP server. This leads to refused connections (“login failed” message) as any server will only allow up to 4 connections. To mitigate this we provide a small Info page with the current load of our RDP servers. Simply choose a server name (e.g. rdp9) with fewer than 4 active sessions instead of rdp.cip.ifi.lmu.de (rdp9.cip.ifi.lmu.de).