UltraVNC is able to blank the monitor of the computer being remotely accessed. My question is, how is this possible?
In my understanding, due to the nature of the Windows OS, remote desktop applications are limited to remotely displaying only snapshots of the current physical screen. I believe UltraVNC is also subject to this limitation. But, somehow, they have found a way to disconnect the physical screen whilst remotely displaying what it should normally display.
Any idea how this is done?
Use the force, read the source.
Related
I've put together a Powershell script to allow me to connect my Bluetooth headphones to my PC without having to open the Bluetooth settings page each time (based on the ones in https://github.com/stanleyguevara/win10-bluetooth-headphones, but using Get-PnPDevice and Get-PnPDeviceProperty to check whether the device is connected rather than using an environment variable to save the state).
The script works, but there's one big QoL issue. The script uses the Bluetooth command line tools here to connect/disconnect the device (in particular, it uses the btcom command). However, these commands are very slow to run, with the whole process taking around a minute total. This is true even though I am using the device's MAC address to connect, and not its friendly name (which would be even slower). This makes using the script much slower than just opening the settings panel each time (though opening the settings panel is less convenient since it requires opening and going through multiple windows).
I've seen many questions about this sort of thing (how to connect/disconnect a Bluetooth device from cmd/powershell, but everything I've seen regarding Windows tends to suggest using the Bluetooth command line tools at the link above, so they don't solve the speed issue. Other things I've found suggest disabling the Bluetooth adapter entirely, which isn't what I want to do. Others suggest using the Win+K shortcut to open up the connections sidepanel, but this doesn't really address the question of whether there's a way to do this from cmd/powershell, and is slightly less automated since you have to wait a second for the list to populate and manually navigate to the device to connect/disconnect (though at least it solves the problem of opening a bunch of windows).
Is there a way to connect/disconnect from a Bluetooth device in cmd/powershell that is faster than btcom?
I wrote a compiled MATLAB GUI that we run on a remote machine via Remote Desktop. Overall it runs fine, but sometimes the GUI will blank out many of the control objects (buttons, table, popups). It seems to happen after the screen of the client computer has been locked or after the GUI has been minimized.
If you move the mouse over the buttons, popups, or table headers, they reappear. The table cells will reappear if they are selected. The GUI hasn't crashed and still works fine, but the objects just disappear until you make them reappear again. I have only seen this happen when using remote desktop (Windows-Windows using Remote Desktop Connection).
How can I get this to stop happening? It isn't really breaking anything, but it is very annoying.
I don't know if this is an issue with MATLAB or with the Remote Desktop configuration, so I posted this question here. Feel free to move this to superuser if you think it's more appropriate.
Remote Desktop has issues with handling low level rendered graphics, and interacting with graphics cards. In our experience (we use Nvidia GPU's for rendering and computation engines on multiple projects/applications) we have found remote desktop to fail in so many cases, that we have ditched it for a third party tool.
I suspect this is what you are running into.
One option I would consider, is forcing Matlab to do software rendering, if this fixes the problem, then for certain it's the graphics cards. The first hit on a google search for "matlab software rendering" returns the matlab command opengl. Reading the documentation page for that, gives the command:
opengl software
It sounds like the remote desktop minimization is causing it. For efficiency, Windows will disable various graphics when a Remote Desktop window is minimized on the client computer. To prevent this, create and set a DWORD RemoteDesktop_SuppressWhenMinimized to 2 at the following registry location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client
After doing this minimizing and locking your screen shouldn't do anything to the RDP session. I doubt it's a graphics card issue, as Windows 10 Creator's Edition allowed remote sessions to use the remote graphics card just like as if you were running locally.
I want to make a windows application whose GUI will be streamed to another device (allowing remote control). The point is that I'm not willing to rely on creating Windows Sessions to isolate the GUI I/O's (1)
To achieve this, I started observing some existing solutions that are able to enable remote access using this premise to see if I could get a clue about where to start.
One of these solution is Winflector (BTW: it is free up to 2 connections).
I got interested in this solution because it seems (I'm guessing) it detects only the repainted regions. What I took from my observations are that:
While the streamed application is "invisibly" running locally in the same session I'm logged in (it shows the application process in my task manager), the application window seems not to be created anyhow - at least Inspect can't get any window information/handle of the application process - It looks like sort of a "GUI StdOut Redirection".
Apparently, no additional Desktop is created;
Also apparently, no Mirror Driver is installed;
Using Process Explorer, I found out Winflector adds some thread's to the original application process. I suspect it is about the GUI redirection (by the thread's names);
The application is started by the Winflector server - that is, it has control about the CreateProcess arguments.
What is the most likely technique to be used in this case?
Windows Hook?
Windows Messages interception?
Special Display Driver?
Sort of Memory Device Context?
Where should I start researching to get a similar approach? Any open source project regarding this subject would also be very welcomed.
PS: By my programming experience, this is sort of a whole "new world" - sorry if my questions are redundant/obvious/non-sense.
(1) That is, this application could be spawned, streamed and interact
with the remote client using the same session which a local user is
already logged in, without conflicting the IO (like a regular VNC
would do, for example). PS: At this moment, I'm focusing only at the
output.
I would like to automatically be able to detect if a BSOD has occurred in a VM (using VMWare Workstation and VIX). I am testing software using all versions of Windows in VMWare and would like to know when a blue screen occurs.
Preferrably I would also like to attempt to automatically send myself the dump file that the BSOD generates, but I can probably figure that out once I can detect that the BSOD actually happened.
The VMWare HA doesn't really suit me due to costs and I don't really care about recovering ... I just care about detection.
Any ideas?
Have guest OS report in to another server with an "I'm Alive" message periodically. If it fails to report assume the worst.
I'm not an expert on VMWare, but if it is possible to programattically get OS disk access and processor usage, then that would also let you know. They shouln't be zero but they will be in a BSOD.
I will query the EventLog in each reboot if I were you (I'm assuming you have autoreboot activated). You can find the evidence of a BSOD there and then send the dumps or do whatever you need.
I am trying to make U9 telit modem send SMS messages. I think I handle protocol correctly, at least, I manage to send them, but only under these circumstances: the native application was executed beforehand, and killed by task manager (without giving it a chance to initialize things).
It looks like the supplied application is good at doing certain initialization/deinitialization which is critical. I also see the difference between the two states in output of AT+CIND command. When I am trying to do things on my own, it returns zeroes (including signal quality), but when I run the same command after killing the native application, the output looks reasonable.
I am out nearly of ideas. I have tried many things, including attempts to spy at modem's COM ports (didn't work). Haven't tried setting windows hooks to see what the application is trying to get thru.
Perhaps you have encountered a similar situation?
Agg's "Advanced Serial Port Monitor" actually helped a lot. Sometimes it caused blue screen, but it helped uncover secret commands which seem to help. AT+PCFULL is not described anywhere on the net, for example. The real trigger of non-operatio was AT+CFUN, the power disable/standby feature.
Also, it appeared that we have more issues. At first, the modem appears on the bus only as disk drive. It doesn't want to appear as any other devices before the drivers are installed. So, the U9 Telit software sends an IOCTL to disk driver to tell the modem to reappear as more devices (modem, 3 serial ports, another disk drive).