Enable RDP in SLES 12

Haven't been working with SuSE Linux for a while and when this new project came along I got my hands on SLES 12 SP3.

I've created an account on suse.com, downloaded the ISO, created the VM and installed from scratch. It went pretty smoothly. The suse account gives a 60 day trial activation key which will allow to update the server. After the 60 days, no more update, but it's just for a lab setup.

The one thing I need from the server is to provide terminal services. So I installed xrdp from using Software Manager in Yast 2

Next, enable xrdp service and start it:

sudo systemctl enable xrdp
sudo systemctl start xrdp

Last thing to do is to configure the firewall. It is enabled by default and will not allow connection to the server. Check that the xrdp service definition exists. If not create a file that looks like this:

Configure the firewall to accept xrdp (and if you are at it, add ssh also). Open the file /etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall2 and change the following lines to include your services:

FW_CONFIGURATIONS_EXT="sshd xrdp"
FW_CONFIGURATIONS_DMZ="sshd xrdp"
FW_CONFIGURATIONS_INT="sshd xrdp"

Save the changes and restart the firewall service:

sudo systemctl restart SuSEfirewall2

Now, if all went good open your preferred RPD client and give it a try: