SA2500 7.1r6 -> Windows 8 RDP and Citrix Proxy

[zanyterp_]

thank you for the feedback; does it continue to work?

[Roxanne_]

We are on SA4500 but what i found is that my old 32bit upgraded to Windows 8 pro machines work fine but all of the new 64bit machines will not stay connected thru terminial services but if i give them Network connect they can run Native MSTSC without issue. 

Maybe some of you can validate my findings or not. 

[mjb_]

I've seen the issue on wired connections using Win8 connecting to a Win7 box via RDP through SA.

I made a Win8 Pro VM specifically to test the wired connections... it gave me the same disconnects as the win8 laptop.

A Win7 VM runnong on the same VMWare ESXi box does not exhibit any disconnects.

The Win8 laptop from remote (wireless mostly) exhibits the disconnects on wireless, wired, and using a Verizon Cell phone USB connection.  Over the verizon cellular connection it was actually more reliable for me to make an OpenVPN tunnel to my home setup, RDP to win7 VM, then connect via SA 6500 to work.  I don't use it wired very often, but I bought a USB network connector for it just to see if it would solve this issue.  The laptop is a test laptop (lenovo X1) and I've been configuring it with any possible network driver combination I can think of and all exhibit the disconnect issues: Microsoft wireless drivers, Intel ProSet, Lenovo Drivers.  It exhibited the problem both before the upgrade to Pro and after the upgrade to Pro on wired and wireless (but I didn't test with the verizon card befor the upgrade to pro).

I'm currently seeing the issue on our production SA6500 cluster  running 7.1R5 and a test SA6500 running 7.3R2.

If I take the laptop to work and connect directly via RDP to the same box I run for 8+ hours with no disconnects - it only exhibits the behavior via SA.

I currently have remote differential compression API support disabled on the laptop, but it doesn't seem to make a difference when it's enabled.

I have noticed the disconnects are sometime more frequent after the Win8 laptop comes out of sleep mode ... a laptop reboot will make the disconnects less frequent ... some of the time.  Much of the time I just give up and connect to the win7 VM and then connect to work so I can keep a stable connection.

Hope this info helps you replicate the issue if you are still gathering data.

[mjb_]

Update:  I installed a DTE SA running 7.3R3 and observed the same disconnect issues from the win8 laptop using both wireless and Verizon Air card connections.  So, in my case, 7.3R3 does not appear to fix this issue.

As a test, I connected the Win8 laptop to the same network as the RDP server (win7 machine) and it ran for 8 hours without a disconnect.  I reconnected the same win8 laptop to the Win7 Machine through the SA 7.3R3 and it gave 5 disconnects within the first 15 minutes.

[zanyterp_]

does that machine work when connected wired (and wifi disabled)?

[nbe_]

When can we expect this to be fixed?  I tried in 7.4R1 and the problem still exists.

[zanyterp_]

we are still trying to replicate in order to begin investigation on what is happening. 

[ChrisJu_]

Just found this on http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w8itpronetworking/thread/9fd4d6d5-1adc-494d-a916-00...

First tests very promising, no disconnects even on ICA:

I think I have found the answer at http://kevinmarquette.blogspot.com/2012/10/windows-8-and-juniper-rdp-vpn.html.

Here is what Greg Wood says.

I've found that the Juniper simply doesn't like UDP that is part of RDP 8. Disable it.

Group Policy:

Local Computer Policy

Computer Configuration

Administrative Templates

Windows Components

Remote Desktop Services

Remote Desktop Connection Client

Turn Off UDP On Client --> Enabled

Regedit:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Services\Client\

Create a dword and assign a value of 1 to: tofClientDisableUDP dword:00000001

[ChrisJu_]

Unfortunately no joy, although on the first notebook I tried the session stayed up for more than 30 minutes. On another box (desktop) there is no improvement at all (RDP session disconnects every minute).

[mjb_]

The X1 has the same disconnect issues on wired and wireless.  Wired is a USB network adapter ... there's no built-in NIC on this box.

some more data:

I built a Win8 Pro VM on a Hyper-V host and attempted RDP connections via SA6500 cluster.  Same issues with disconnections occurred.

So, I tried a Win2012 server VM on the same hyper-v host and had no disconnections at all.

I'm going to put the tofClientDisableUDP reg change on both systems and try it out to see if that helps.  A co-worker with a Win8 X1 laptop tried it and initially reported success, but then was dropped.