Month: August 2010

Problems with RDP clipboard – solved

I regularly use RDP sessions to connect to systems which I am testing.

I’ve noticed lots of problems with the clipboard on my PC when I do this. This seems to be more of a problem when I connect to older operating systems (such as XP) from a new OS (like Vista or Windows 7).

After a while it becomes impossible to use the clipboard and copy and paste between RDP sessions. In addition it becomes impossible to paste on the local machine as well. This is a complete pain in the ~@*% and until now the only way that I’ve been able to “clear” the problem is to reboot my PC and re-establish the connections to the remote systems.

The problem is caused by the rdpclip process on the remote PC taking control of the clipboard on the local PC and not releasing it. It is possible to kill and restart the process which causes this problem. This fixes the problem without having to restart RDP sessions or reboot your PC.

These are the commands.
taskkill /f /im rdpclip.exe
rdpclip.exe

The first line kills the rdpclip process and the second line restarts it.
These commands should be run on the remote system.

 

Changing LoadRunner Agent to run as a process or service

During the installation of LoadRunner if you select “Allow virtual users to run on this machine without user login”, the LoadRunner agent will run as a Windows system service called “LoadRunner Agent Service”.

If you choose “Manually log in to the Load Generator “, the LoadRunner agent will be run as a process named magentproc.exe.  This means you need to start the LoadRunner agent manually each time you reboot the PC/server or you need to put the LoadRunner agent process into a windows startup group.

Some vUser types will only run if the agent is running as a service (GUI, SAP, Citrix etc.). This is because they need to run in a user context.

After installation, to switch from running the LoadRunner agent as a service to running as a process:
magentservice.exe -remove
Add this shortcut to the startup folder – “C:\Program Files (x86)\HP\LoadRunner\LAUNCH_SERVICE\bin\magentproc.exe”

After installation, to switch from running the LoadRunner agent as a process to running as a service:
Remove the LoadRunner Agent Process from the Startup folder
magentservice.exe -install

N.B. You need admin rights to do this. The magentservice.exe file is in the C:\Program Files (x86)\HP\LoadRunner\bin or C:\Program Files\HP\LoadRunner\bin folder.