I use Remmina on a Fedora 41 box to connect via RDP to several boxes running RL 9.5. This setup has worked for a long time. Lately though, if the connection is idle for as little as four minutes or so, it will disconnect and give a message saying that it is attempting to reconnect. If I enter the login password and let it reconnect, the keyboard is nonfunctional. I have to disconnect and close Remmina then reopen and reconnect. This behavior does not occur using Remmina to connect to Windows Server 2019 via RDP. Meanwhile, I found a MS application with the cryptic name “Windows App” that runs on macOS and allows me to connect via RDP to RL 9.5. That connection can sit idle for days and remain connected. So is there any reason why Remmina to RL does this? I looked for help on the Remmina site but found nothing.
OK, but how are you providing RDP on the destination hosts? e.g. do you have a port open, and some kind of RDP server?
XRDP running with firewall configured. As I mentioned, it was previously working fine and still works as long as the connection via Remmina is not idle. And Windows App connects and works perfectly using RDP.
Perhaps the idle timeout in xrdp configuration needs to be increased or disabled? Someone with similar issue: XRDP remote timeout settings · neutrinolabs/xrdp · Discussion #2795 · GitHub this references the config file sesman.ini that can be changed.
There’s a lot of posts that can be found with google that basically limit what you can do with Remmina/FreeRDP to solve this, hence looking at the other side eg: xrdp is what you need to change. It seems nobody from Remmina/FreeRDP wants to offer keep-alive options.
Why it doesn’t happen with Windows is perhaps Windows hasn’t been configured to terminate idle sessions. The same with the other client that you used is most likely sending a keep-alive signal that Remmina/FreeRDP doesn’t do and probably won’t have in the future either.
In summary, your solution here is to reconfigure XRDP or use a different RDP client that has keep-alive functionality.
My questions are: why did it work so reliably then suddenly stop? Also, why can Windows App stay connected to XRDP for days even with no activity on the session? Then there is the thing where the keyboard is inop when I reconnect to RL without exiting Remmina. I can enter a terminal window and pound keys until I am blue in the face with no characters showing. I will check the timeout setting thing nonetheless.
Already answered that:
Why did it work before and not now? Obviously something changed - updates. You say the connection from Fedora stopped working - as you know Fedora is effectively an unstable distribution. Perhaps make a desktop installation with Rocky and use Remmina from that to connect to your XRDP and see if the problem exists there. If not, then Fedora is the problem. Otherwise you need to explain when it stopped working and what you did when it stopped working. What systems were updated? But like I said, Fedora is unstable, Rocky is stable, so it’s going to be pretty clear on this.
Fedora 40 and my Remmina sessions to Windows used to connect quickly. Now in Fedora 41 they take anywhere between 30-60 seconds before I actually see the Windows desktop. Still don’t have a fix, but I know Fedora 41 is the problem. This would also give evidence to the fact that Fedora changed Remmina or FreeRDP that has caused problems - bugs would need to be raised with Fedora to fix it.
You cannot use Remmina connection to Windows as a comparison - as I said Windows may not have a timeout set and that is why the session stays connected. Or Windows is issuing a keep-alive signal for the session. I’ve offered explanations to why it’s causing issues.
Most likely the problem here is Fedora, and not Rocky. In which case, you’d need to ask on the Fedora forums why when you updated Fedora it stopped working. But check the settings I asked in sesman.ini as maybe you can fix it by disabling the timeout on the server-side.