Windows operating systems generally managed with RDP remotely. RDP or Remote Desktop Protocol Provides graphical remote management capabilities. Windows operating systems provides a tool named Remote Desktop Connection . This tool can be invoked with mstsc command. In this tutorial we will look different features of Terminal Server Connection or mstsc.

Start Remote Connection Dialog Box

We can use mstsc command simply start Remote Desktop Connection application with GUI. We can call mstsc command from a MS-DOS command prompt or run Run .

> mstsc

Provide Remote System IP Address or Hostname

We can make things easier by providing the remote system or server IP address or hostname. But the hostname should be resolved in our preconfigured DNS server. We will use /v: options with the server IP address or hostname. In this example we will try to connect remote system with IP address 192.168.122.46

> mstsc /v:192.168.122.46

Provide Remote System RDP Port

By default RDP service uses TCP 3389 as port numbers. But in some cases this may be changed because of security reasons or technical difficulties. In this situations we should provide the port number explicitly. We can add port number after the hostname or IP address of the remote system by delimiting with : . In this example remote system RDP port number is 10000

> mstsc /v:192.168.122.46:10000

Start Full Screen Mode

By default the Remote Desktop Connection starts with the resolution of the remote system. As we know we can change this resolution or screen mode whatever we want. In this example we will simply fit the Remote Desktop Connection to our current screen resolution by making it Full Screen. We will use /f option to make full screen.

> mstsc  /f  /v:192.168.122.46

Set Width and Height of Screen

In previous example we have set the Remote Desktop Connection window as full screen. An other option is explicitly specifying the screen resolution. We can specify the width and height of the screen. We will use /w: for width and /h: for height options of mstsc command. In this example we will set the width 1024 and height 800.

> mstsc  /w:1024 /h:800  /v:192.168.122.46

Open RDP File For Editing

Remote Desktop Connection sessions can be saved into files with rdp extension. These files holds related configuration about remote desktop connection like remote system IP, compression,resource sharing etc. We can open these rdp configuration files with /edit .

> mstsc  /edit RC.RDP