Recently one of my good friend asked me to help him set up a Counter-Strike Source dedicated server on his rented Windows 2008 server. I’ve previously done that on a Linux system before and I don’t think it’d be a problem to do that on a Windows server since there are documentation to teach how to do that. In Linux, I get to run commands using PuTTy via SSH and transfer files using FTP.

As for Windows, the server administrator gave me only a user account to login with Remote Desktop Connection. In SSH, all I see is a black colored console box and everything is in command line but in Remote Desktop Connection, I get to control the computer remotely like I am sitting in front of the computer. I couldn’t use FTP to upload files from my computer to the server because the server admin didn’t install a FTP service. There are scripts and plugins that I need to transfer from my computer to the server and I was thinking of the best way to do it. I could email the files to my own email account and then download from the server, or I can upload it to my website or rapidshare and then download from the server, or I can create a temporary FTP server on my computer and then download the required files.

Creating a temporary FTP server on my computer seems to be the best solution because it only involves one way transfer instead of uploading and then downloading. After checking the Remote Desktop Connection settings, I found that RDC already has support for making my computer files available to a remote desktop connection session. Here is how to set it up.

You can run Remote Desktop Connection from Start > Programs > Accessories > Remote Desktop Connection. You should see a small box to enter a computer IP address or hostname with a few buttons such as Connect, Cancel, Help and Options.

By default Remote Desktop Connection doesn’t map my local computer drives to the remote computer. You’ll need to click the Options button, go to Local Resources tab, click the More button at Local devices and Resource, and check Drives to map all your local drives to the server. Instead of mapping all drives, you can also map the drives that you want by expanding the drive category.

When you connect, you should get a warning asking you do you trust this remote connection because you’ve allowed the remote computer to access your local drives on your computer. After clicking Connect, open My Computer and you should see your local drives on the remote computer. Now you can start transferring files from your computer to the remote server WITHOUT installing FTP services or upload it to rapidshare to download later.

I also found out that you can also copy and paste files from local to remote desktop if you’ve enabled mapping of local drive resources. Let’s say I open a text file on my computer and I copied the content to the clipboard. I am able to paste the clipboard content to the remote computer that is connected via Remote Desktop Connection!

[tags]rdc, remote, desktop, connection, access[/tags]