RDP
RDP stands for "remote desktop protocol". RDP allows you to access resources from any machine running Microsoft Terminal Services. This allows for the GUI of the operating system on the remote machine to be utilized via your machine. The easy way to think of how RDP works is to consider it as pushing lots of screenshots really fast. However, RDP actually is much smarter than that. RDP allows for multiple channels of communication. Each channel can provide different types of data such as device communcation and presentation data from the server. Simplified, RDP pushes a combination of pictures and information referred to as "primatives". A primative is an instruction on how to do a task that is often repeated such as drawing a line, square, formatting text, etc.. A simple example is a block of text with a picture.
Fig. 1: An example of information to be sent across RDP
The picture gets sent through RDP as an image, the block of text gets sent as an instruction. The instruction for the text would include things like the font face (Arial), the font size (24px), the font color (black), the text string ( "An image of a computer "), and other important details such as positioning. By using these multiple channels and splitting the data into seperate pieces, RDP can operate under much slower network speeds than other networking protocols while maintaining a level of quality.
In addition these multiple channels can allow you to tunnel resources from the server to your computer. You can tunnel drive access, printing, and even sound. This would allow you to print to your local printer, save to the hard drive on your own machine, and listen to any sound generated on the server. Also, RDP is both compressed and encrypted. This ensures that no one can listen in on your actions that are being sent between your computer and the server. Because the data is compressed, you will see better speed results.
Microsoft refers to the official RDP client software as Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) or Terminal Services Client (TSC). Some version of RDC is available for all major platforms including Windows (installed by default), Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, and others. At this time an RDP client can only be used to connect to Windows based computers as they are the only platforms that can currently run Microsoft Terminal Services.
