How to connect to Windows Server 2008 Remote Desktop with Network Level Authentication Required

As of Ubuntu 12.04, you can use Remmina to connect to Windows servers with Network Level Authentication enabled.

sudo apt-get -y install remmina

Remmina uses FreeRDP for RDP connections and NLA support was added to FreeRDP in version 1.0, which is available to Ubuntu 12.04 and above. If you happen to be using an earlier version of Ubuntu and cannot upgrade, here's an updated version of remmina here, although I can't vouch for its stability: https://launchpad.net/~freerdp-team/+archive/freerdp

If that doesn't work, you might be able to connect directly:

  1. Install the above PPA
    sudo apt-add-repository ppa:freerdp-team/freerdp
  2. Install the freerdp package:
    sudo apt-get install freerdp
  3. xfreerdp --plugin cliprdr -g 1024x768 -k no -u {username} -d {domain-name} {target-machine}

If you do the latter, you can can always create an alias in ~/.bash_aliases:
alias rdp='xfreerdp --plugin cliprdr -g 1152x864 -k no -u username -d DOMAIN'


I solved this issue by right clicking on the entry in Remmina, going to edit, clicking on the advanced tab, and then changing the security field to "RDP" from "Negotiate"


New command formatting

After my last update, I got confronted with FreeRDP 1.2.0 (probably it changed already with version 1.0.2 - and got though also relevant for most Ubuntu users). Its protocol changed how to connect. Try the following example:

xfreerdp /u:<username> /v:<hostname> /size:<WxH>

Additional features

There are a lot of features you might want to discover on the development page https://github.com/FreeRDP/FreeRDP/wiki/CommandLineInterface


I solved problem on 13.04 with setting TLS when connecting to Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise server. Auto-negotiation didn't work.