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Resolve RustDesk Not Generating an ID or Making a Connection

  • Adam Douglas

There seems to be quite a few of people experiencing issues trying to use RustDesk. The two common problems are either having the ID never generating or never connecting to the RustDesk network’s free relay server. In my experience of using the free open source software, I’ve not had these problems until today. I was determined to figure this all out.

Investigation

I began searching online for a solution, but unfortunately I kept coming up empty. The results kept coming back with either similar problems, but not entirely related, or finding people talking about the issue, but with no solution. My intuition kept coming to me over, and over with the thought that it has to be a simple network problem. I ignored this thought, because I kept telling myself I have no evidence of proof. So I decided to monitor the TCP traffic with tcpdump, and I noticed a pattern. Every time I had RustDesk running it would repeatedly try to connect to three domain names, “rs-sg.rustdesk.com”, “rs-cn.rustdesk.com”, and “rs-us.rustdesk.com”. For further proof I wanted to know what were all the default relay servers being used, so I searched through the RustDesk source code. Shortly after I was able to confirm that one of the three servers I already found are indeed used to establish a relay connection. With this new-found evidence made me think back to my intuition that the host names were not being resolved so a connection could be established to the free relay servers. Right after discovery this I quickly tried to resolve each domain name manually with the command dig. The results confirmed my intuition, each domain name was not resolving to an IP address, and therefore explains why I’m having problems.

Environment

  • Arch Linux
  • GNOME v43.2
  • RustDesk v1.1.9

Problem

Under ID a message of “Generating … “ is displayed, and never ends up generating an ID. Towards the bottom of the application window a message is displayed “Connecting to the RustDesk network…”, but never establishes a connection. One or both of these issues can occur at the same time resulting in being unable to connect to a system.

RustDesk screenshot illustrating a connection issue

Solution

To resolve the network connection issue, I simply changed the DNS servers being used. Once this was done, I was able to use the software as expected.

How to change your DNS servers depends on your system, and network configuration. Though this is usually done by changing the DNS server addresses on a gateway router, or locally on the system itself (e.g. /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/systemd/network/20-wired.network, etc.).

This is post 76 of 100, and is round 2 of the 100 Days To Offload challenge.

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