Hello World,

Back again on the RDS 2012 R2. Today’s topic is about a strange issue that users might encounter when they are trying to launch remoteapp from the RD Web page.  I would keep this page as a knowledge base.  If you know other situations where such behaviour can occur, please share with us and we will add this into this post.

Problem description

The symptom are quite simple and straight forward.  The user is able to connect to the RD web page.  The user can see the remoteapps published to him.  However, when the user click on one of the published apps, nothing happens.

Possible solutions

The fact that the user cannot launch remoteapps can be for one of the following reasons

Reason 1 :  Activex is blocked by Group policy

We had a situation where indeed, Internet explorer, was heavily locked out. Because of this, none of the published apps could be launched from the web page.  As a workaround for such situation, we assume that using the RemoteApp and Desktop Connections  (see  http://c-nergy.be/blog/?p=4868) would have been an option.

Reason 2 :  Wrong domain name used during the login process 

We had another situation where the same issue occured.  This time however, the Internet explorer was working properly but still the user was not able to launch any applications.  We had to use the monitor the users while trying to login to the web page in order to understand what was the problem…

In this specific case, we had multiple domains interconnected via trust relationships.  The user was trying to use an account from another domain to connect to the web page.  The RDS infrastructure was located in domain contoso.com (and configured to allow only contoso.com users to use the remoteapps) and the user was using the Fabrikam\UserName to login into the RD Web page.

After explaining to the user that he needed to use the proper account (as described in the user guide), the user was finally able to login into the web page and launch the application as expected

Reason 3 :  Missing domain name when performing the login (only Windows 2008 R2) 

We had a similar issue as well on a Windows 2008 R2 infrastructure.  With Windows 2008 R2, there is no check on the web login page if you enter or not a domain name (not sure if this is still valid as some hotfixes might have been issued since then).  If the user logs in providing only the user account, we have encountered the same situation where the user was not able to start any published applications.  When the user logs off and login using the proper format DomainName\USerName, there is no issues anymore.

 

Final Notes

Here again, this was a short post.  If you encounter strange issues/situations while using RDS 2012 R2 (and you have found the solution), let us know and will publish it over here.  We will then be able to build a good knowledge base for all the users out there

Till next time

See ya