In an attempt to get remote desktop set up over SSL tunneling with compression, I have installed stunnel on my Windows XP Professional SP2 machine and created a "portable" stunnel/config/dll zip that just contains the essentials to create a pre-configured tunnel.
Here are the two config files:
Server -------------------------------- ; Sample stunnel configuration file by Michal Trojnara 2002-2005 ; Some options used here may not be adequate for your particular configuration
; Certificate/key is needed in server mode and optional in client mode ; The default certificate is provided only for testing and should not ; be used in a production environment cert = stunnel.pem key = stunnel.pem
; Some performance tunings socket = l:TCP_NODELAY=1 socket = r:TCP_NODELAY=1 compression = zlib
; Some debugging stuff useful for troubleshooting debug = 6 output = G:\Stunnel Logs\stunnel.log
taskbar = no
; Use it for client mode client = no
; Service-level configuration
[remote-desktop] accept = 9833 connect = 127.0.0.1:3389
---------------------------------
Client --------------------------------- ; Sample stunnel configuration file by Michal Trojnara 2002-2005 ; Some options used here may not be adequate for your particular configuration
; Some performance tunings socket = l:TCP_NODELAY=1 socket = r:TCP_NODELAY=1 compression = zlib
; Some debugging stuff useful for troubleshooting debug = 7 output = stunnel.log
taskbar = yes
; Use it for client mode client = yes
; Service-level configuration
[remote-desktop] accept = 127.0.0.1:6389 connect = my.host.name:9833 ----------------------------------
The procedure I used was as follows - start Stunnel on the host, run upstairs with the zipped "portable" stunnel on a USB drive, run stunnel on the other PC, also running XP Pro SP2. Start->run->mstsc, enter 127.0.0.1:6389 and all that happens is that stunnel instantly crashes then Remote Desktop times out.
What am I doing wrong?