Penetration Testing: RE: Terminal services and remote programs.

["Thor (Hammer of God)" <thor () hammerofgod com>]

Nope.  Hardware won't really help you here-- graphic intensive programs
over RDP will always be limited by the way that screen refreshes work
over RDP.  You're basically taking data from a direct screen write and
packaging it up to send to an RDP client for rendering.  Even accessing
the host on a local network gives you sketchy performance.  You can test
this yourself by trying to watch a video (like youtube or something)
over an RDP session.  You'll see how poor the performance is.  Now, this
is all contingent upon exactly what your users will be doing -- viewing
PDFs or Visio may be fine -- however, actually using the remote desktop
to *design* something or to do non-trival work in photoshop will make
users commit suicide.  But that could be a good thing ;)

t 


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Halliday [mailto:paul.halliday () gmail com]
> Sent: Friday, May 02, 2008 1:48 PM
> To: Thor (Hammer of God)
> Cc: pen-test () securityfocus com
> Subject: Re: Terminal services and remote programs.
>
> Could you expand on this a bit please? Have you seen a setup like this
> in action? Will decent harware help mitigate this? They will be load
> balancing across 2 decent servers.
>
> Thanks.
>
> On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 12:04 AM, Thor (Hammer of God)
> <thor () hammerofgod com> wrote:
> > Not to mention that running Photoshop via RDP is a really bad way to
> go
> >  from a performance standpoint...
> >
> >  t
> >
> >
> >  > -----Original Message-----
> >  > From: listbounce () securityfocus com
> >  > [mailto:listbounce () securityfocus com] On Behalf Of Sean Tindall
> >  > Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 4:05 PM
> >  > To: pen-test () securityfocus com
> >
> >
> > > Subject: RE: Terminal services and remote programs.
> >  >
> >  > Except that to remain license compliant you need to ensure all of
> your
> >  > users have licenses for those applications anyway.
> >  >
> >  > What you think terminal services or citrix is a CHEAPER solution
> than
> >  > deploying apps to desktops?  Only on REALLY large scales, and
site
> >  > licenses for these apps are still required.
> >  >
> >  > -----Original Message-----
> >  > Hey Paul,
> >  > Things like Citrix work exactly like this. So that way you do not
> have
> >  > to install programs on each and every user workstation; in this
> case
> >  > Office and Adobe possibly primarily because licenses are costly.
> >  >
> >  >
> >  >
> >  >
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