Magnetic Stripe Reader over Terminal Server has random Uppercase/Lowercase nonsense

Posted by Peter Turner on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Peter Turner
Published on 2009-09-11T17:26:58Z Indexed on 2012/07/07 21:18 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 467

Filed under:
|

The Magnetic Stripe Reader that I'm using and testing is just supposed to be sending keystrokes. Unfortunately, it seems to randomly be sending upper case and lower case keystrokes, sometimes substituting % for 5 and ^ for 6 and vice versa. (If you've ever programmed for a magnetic strip reader, you know that's not a good thing.)

Is there something in the RDP protocol that causes this? I've got kind of a convoluted system, running XP inside virtualbox on Fedora 11 RDP'ed into a win2k3 server. It works on the XP VM and it doesn't work on the RDP'ed one.

What's weirder, is that I'm not even emulating the USB drivers for my Mag Card Reader. Linux is sending keystrokes straight in to windows, and MSTSC on windows XP is sending crap to the Win2k3 server. I'm 99% certain this isn't a problem with the card reader, it has nothing to do with my programming either. (I get the same junk coming into notepad that I get coming into our software [that's why I didn't ask on SO]).

And, it works with rdesktop programs other than MSTSC.exe!

Needless to say, I'm in need of some RDP Guruship.

© Server Fault or respective owner

Related posts about rdp

Related posts about terminal-server