VirtualBox has builtin RDP support, much like VMware's Remote View (VNC), however it does take some tinkering to get working on Ubuntu Desktop / Server.

The main issue is when trying to use PAM authentication, on the host system, to authenticate remote users who wish to RDP into a Virtual Machine. PAM needs to be configured to allow the VRDPAuth.so library access to PAM services. This can be done by

1. Creating a new PAM configuration file

sudo gedit /etc/pam.d/vrdpauth

and adding the following lines

auth            required        pam_unix.so
account         required        pam_unix.so broken_shadow

Save the file

2. You now need to set an environment variable so that VRDPAuth.so uses the correct PAM Service instead of the /etc/pam.d/login service:

export VRDP_AUTH_PAM_SERVICE="vrdpauth"

• You can alternately set this as part of your .bashrc to save retyping at each login.