mRemoteNG Managing AnyDesk Connections

Maintaining connections to clients, workstations, and servers over various protocols such as RDP, VNC, SSH, AnyDesk or TeamViewer can be challenging to manage with out the right tool. The tool I found best to manage this is mRemoteNG. As I switched from using TeamViewer for clients, I needed to sort out how to add these connections to my mRemoteNG sites.

To get started, we first need to create an External Tool. We do this by clicking Tools - External Tools

Select "New" at the top left of the main dialog

Under Display Name give it a name to use. File name we are calling PowerShell and for our arguments  we are taking insight from the AnyDesk and mRemoteNG support files and using; 

"'%PASSWORD%' | &'C:\Program Files (x86)\AnyDesk\AnyDesk.exe' %USERNAME%'@ad' --with-password"

Once this is done, we can create out connection.

In our new connection we fill out the information like we normally would with the username and password (minus @ad, we added it to our one liner), but for protocol we now select Ext.App for our External Applications and select the External Tool we just added - in my case AnyDesk Connection. 

Provided everything is configured properly, you should be able to double click your connection and connect to the AnyDesk client.

Note: I had issues with long passwords that use special characters such as "!". Also had issues with "Try to integrate" so I left that disabled in the External Tool I created.

What exactly is happening?

We are using the %PASSWORD% and %USERNAME% variable from mRemoteNG username and password field to pipe into AnyDesk where we have used the available command --with-password to let it know that we were including a password. I simply included '@ad' following the %USERNAME% variable to avoid having to include it in every connection. 

You can find out more about functions and possibilities for your connections below:

mRemoteNG External Tool functions https://mremoteng.readthedocs.io/en/master/howtos/external_tools.html#start-external-application

AnyDesk Command Line https://support.anydesk.com/Command_Line_Interface