Hi!

I normally use Parallels Client  for RDP connections but its interface is truly awful.
Unfortunately, it is the only one I've found that supports SOCKS proxy instead of only RD Gateway.
SOCKS proxy support makes it possible to use putty's dynamic port forwarding (essentially, a SOCKS proxy) to connect to a whole network behind a linux jumphost instead of opening tunnels to each Windows server behind it.

Is it possible to add this one as a feature request?

Thanks!
--Ariel

There is no built-in SOCKS support in the hosted RDP Control and if Microsoft doesn't support, RD Tabs can't, since it uses the same libraries. It would require essentially writing an entire generic SOCKS proxy which would be a lot of work. I personally really like RD Gateway and RD Tabs supports it natively, but if it doesn't work for you, I understand.

You might want to look at third party SOCKS proxies. I was curious about this so I did some searching and it looks like there is a free one here: https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks-windows 

I haven't tried it, I'm not set up for this, but I think all you would have to do is connect the proxy client to the remote putty port forwarder, then set RD Tabs to connect to "localhost" on whatever your SOCKS proxy's custom port is. I think that might work.

Let me know if you figure something out. I'm curious about this.

Hi!

Thanks for your reply.

I kind of expected that was the reason since many similar apps use the same libraries and I have no clue what Parallels' people did to support it (maybe writing their own RDP library, I don't know).
I had come across shadowsocks before, among others, but it doesn't solve the issue I have: what it actually does is something very similar to what Putty already provides but over HTTP instead of SSH (I found this video that shows how it is set up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-1b6SxfXv0 )
I'll keep looking....

Thanks!
--Ariel

Sorry to hear that doesn't solve your issue. RDP-over-SOCKS is definitely a very unusual configuration. I'm curious, is this a custom thing you set up, or is it something Parallels is doing for their virtualization stack?

Good luck finding an alternative, sorry I couldn't help!

I don't think it is so unusual.... it may come up if you only have a linux machine on the public network to provide access instead of a windows one with RD Gateway.
What I normally do is SSH into that publicly accessible linux machine and set up dynamic port forward to expose the whole network behind it on my workstation (it works very well with any TCP service and even provides DNS resolution through the proxy.
To show that there are a few more after this, check out this same feature request in mRemoteNG's repo (link ); there is a lot of info in it so it might be a good read.

To be honest, I have no idea about the motivation Parallels had to include it in their client... it was like that when I found it and I took advantage 😉

Thanks!
--Ariel