Scripting Remote Desktop Bookmarks

A few years ago I was searching for a way to easily create bookmarks in Microsoft Remote Desktop 8 on the Mac. Prior to version 8 you could drop an .RDP file on a machine and that was really all you needed to do to give your users the ability to connect to servers. Granted, you can still use this method, it’s just a bit sloppier, in my opinion.

So I went searching for a way to script the bookmarks, and that led me to my good friend Ben Toms’ (@macmuleblog) blog. I found his post, “HOW TO: CREATE A MICROSOFT REMOTE DESKTOP 8 CONNECTION” and started experimenting. After some trial and error, I discovered that using PlistBuddy to create the bookmarks just wasn’t being consistent. So I looked into using the defaults command instead. I finally was able to settle on the following script:

[gist]227c2294c935a0f48f28[/gist]

You can find that code in my GitHub repo here.

RDC URI Attribute Support

I had posted that script up on JAMF Nation back in June 2014 when someone had asked about deploying connections. Recently user @gmarnin posted to that thread asking if anyone knew how to add an alternate shell key to the script. After no response, he reached out to me on the Twitter (I’m @stevewood_tx in case you care). So, I dusted off my script, fired up my Mac VM, and started experimenting.

The RDC GUI does not allow for a place to add these URI Attributes. I read through that web page and Marnin forwarded me this one as well. Marnin explained that he was able to get it to work when he exported the bookmark as an .RDP file and then used a text editor to add the necessary “alternate shell:s:” information. Armed with this knowledge, I went to the VM and started testing.

First I created a bookmark in a fresh installation of RDC. I had no bookmarks at all. After creating a bookmark I jumped into Terminal and did a read of the plist file and came up with this:

[gist]b0feb472a08326d7e122[/gist]

Now that we had a baseline, I exported the bookmark to the desktop of the VM, edited it to add the “alternate shell” bits, and then re-imported it into RDC as a new bookmark. I then tested to make sure it would work as advertised. After some trial and error, I was able to get the exact syntax for the “alternate shell” entry to work. Now I just needed to see what changes were made in the plist file. A quick read showed me the following:

[gist]9758aa9fcfe7cef3cba5[/gist]

The key is the line that has “remoteProgram” as part of the entry. You have to get the full path on the Windows machine to the application you want to run on connection to the server. Once you know that path, you can adjust your bookmark script however you need.

The script I posted above, and is linked in my GitHub repo, contains the line to add that Remote Program (alternate shell). If you do not need it, just comment it out of the script.