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I have a light duty Debian 11 (Bullseye) server. It will mostly be a file server when ready. I had installed XRDP so I can connect to and manage it from my Win10 machine when working with the UI would make more sense, depending on what I was doing. It was nice, worked perfectly, and even would bump out a locally logged in session for the RDP connection.

Later on I accidentally borked up some packages trying to get something to work, and it necessitated a complete reinstall of Debian 11. Following this reinstall, though, I cannot get my RDP connection to work correctly. It fails when a local session is logged in (not a big deal I suppose, given how it looks like that is the norm). But the worst part of it is that most things are blank when connected. The desktop is white, the "Activities" icons do not display, the clock/network item in the upper right corner does not display (but clicking there will still open it), and most UI applications will not run (you can see the system trying to launch the application, but after a short while it just closes without so much as an empty window). So far only the terminal application will open.

Searching for resolutions to the problem don't yield much help. Most search results center around one of the following:

  1. Fails to connect or immediately closes after successful login
  2. Blank/black screen when trying to connect
  3. Missing desktop icons

The rest tend to not be sufficiently related/applicable. Too much stuff seems to be either far too old or for different Linux distros with different directory structures. The only suggestions I've gotten so far have been to use a different desktop other than Gnome, which seems silly because it worked perfectly previously. I don't know what I'm missing with any of this, as best I can tell I have XRDP and the IPTABLES firewall both setup just fine. I've tried using Xvnc session instead of the default Xorg session, too, but that just fails to establish a desktop session altogether.

-EDIT-

Ok, so looking at things, it seems like perhaps the problem is perhaps xrdp-sesman. Checking logs and netstat it looks like it isn't running. I don't see it called in the logs, and netstat doesn't show anything on port 3350. Can't seem to figure out why.

Michael McCauley
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1 Answers1

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It's pretty common for this type of thing to happen. I've struggled many times. I've finally come to the conclusion that 1. you always have to log out the local user, and 2. if things get messed up, on the local box, ssh in and restart it, or remotely log out the user logged in.

I'd check out 4.2 (and really the whole page) on here (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xrdp) and/or base your setup on this (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/linux/use-remote-desktop?tabs=azure-cli)

Using Xfce (as they do in that setup) has been the easiest for me to get right.

beauk
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  • I've been using PowerShell as a terminal connection to the server to try to manage it. So far so good. But yeah, I messed thing sup really bad. So bad that I could add or remove packages. The locale functionality somehow got completely wrecked and nothing would work to fix it. Prevented all attempts to manage the server. But, I'll see if any of this can help get this all put back together. – Michael McCauley Nov 07 '22 at 14:50
  • Looks like xrdp-sesman isn't listening on port 3350. Not sure why... – Michael McCauley Nov 07 '22 at 15:37