Remote Desktops

Remote desktops (VNC and RDP)

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Both protocol stacks are written for this project — no third-party client is bundled or shelled out to. Remote desktop profiles live in their own rail section (Desktops on a phone).

VNC

Address and port name the RFB server (5900 by default) and the credential is an optional VNC password — RFB has no username. Auth methods the server offers but Skerry does not support are reported as such instead of failing silently.

RDP

RDP connects with NLA (CredSSP/NTLM) credentials. An existing .rdp file can be imported to create a profile: the address, port and farm routing token are read, malformed parts are skipped with a warning, and passwords are never imported — authentication is set when you connect. RD Gateway is not supported; the connection goes straight to the host.

Extras per profile:

• Audio — Play the session's sound here redirects the session's sound to this device instead of leaving it on the server; the output device is picked in the profile.
• Clipboard — share the clipboard with the remote machine.
• Display scale — the client tells the server how large a pixel is, so a HiDPI session is not drawn at 96 dpi.

H.264 is used when a decoder is available: on Android always (MediaCodec), on desktop when ffmpeg is on PATH. Without it the session falls back to the other codecs the stack implements.

In a session

Control	What it does
Quality	Auto / Low / Medium / High, changeable mid-session
Resize to window	the remote desktop resizes to the window (remembered per profile)
Reset zoom	back to 1:1
View only	input is not sent
Screenshot	writes a PNG and says where
Send Ctrl+Alt+Del	the one chord the guest gets deliberately
Clipboard menu	see what the remote copied, Copy here / Send mine

Getting the keyboard back

A remote desktop forwards every key to the guest — otherwise a shortcut would be stolen from the remote machine. The one exception is the release chord (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K, ⌃⌥⇧K on macOS — shown in Settings → Keyboard under REMOTE DESKTOP), which hands the keyboard back to the app. Without it the framebuffer would be a keyboard trap.

Certificates

An RDP server's certificate is trusted on first use by fingerprint and re-checked afterwards, the same way SSH host keys are. Refusing a certificate stops the connection; connecting again shows it for review.

Known limitation

Scrolling in RDP/VNC sessions is not stable in every setup — tracked as issue #265.