Remote Management Tasks and RDP Client Problems

During my first few weeks of testing at Blue Medora, I was tasked with installing IBM Tivoli Monitoring and IBM DB2 on Windows 2012. This is where the issue first arrived. My cursor would sometimes fail to render while I was working when I was using the CORD RDP client. After checking other RDP clients in the App Store I decided to give Microsoft’s latest client a shot. In this article, you will learn about the products and my experiences with the two RDP clients.

CORD is a free open source RDP client for OS X and works well for remote management tasks. However, when you need to connect to a Windows Server 2012 (including R2) you may run into issues with the cursor not being rendered for a short time or for the entire session!

This turns the simplest tasks into a frustrating exercise, with the most irritating part is it may not happen for several sessions before the issue will occur.

The simplest way I have found to avoid this issue entirely is to use the latest Microsoft RDP client. It is as simple and convenient to use as CORD, and hasn’t presented any unwanted issues since I’ve been using it. This RDP is available in the Apple App Store. Unlike most of the other RDP clients available in the App Store, it is free of charge.

This is a very “solid” tool to use when working with the latest iteration of the Windows OS.

Ritchie Latimore is a QA Engineer with Blue Medora, bringing a wealth of experience from IT, data analysis, and solutions research to the quality assurance role.