I am using RDP a lot, and when I RDP to other physical systems running Windows the local screen is usually blank or off, or if on by accident, the screensaver turns it off after say 5 minutes. The virtual desktops are entirely independent of physical desktops, except that there is a hard limit on user sessions on Windows desktop (7/8/10/11) compared to Windows servers. Are kiosks different?
Disabling the keyboard should be possible via pnputil.exe, you can either integrate a remote call to this into a Guacamole plugin or probably also monitor events on the local system and do you own en/disable locally. Imho local devices are not related to any RDP functionality. Joachim Von: Nick Couchman <[email protected]> Gesendet: Mittwoch, 16. September 2026 22:02 An: [email protected] Cc: Ricardo Feliciano <[email protected]> Betreff: Re: Screen blanking? On Wed, Sep 16, 2026 at 3:55 PM Christopher Cook <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Hi, We are connecting remotely into Windows kiosks. We use Apache Guacamole to connect to Windows PCs via RDP. Does anyone know how we can setup screen blanking so that when we connect to the Windows PC, the monitor that is connected to goes blank? We are willing to switch from RDP to VNC if that will help our cause. Disabling the keyboard would be a nice to have as well. I do not believe that this is possible with RDP - Guacamole works the same as any other RDP client, and, to my knowledge, RDP in general does not support the ability to block/blank the local screen when a remote connection is made. There are some VNC servers that support this, and I believe the configuration for it is on the VNC server side and does not require anything special on the client-side. I believe UltraVNC supports it, and I'm sure some of the others do, as well. That said, VNC doesn't perform as well as RDP, and, by default, doesn't do any encryption, so you'll want to make sure you factor both of those in (guacd needs to be "close" to the remote systems, network-wise, and you should implement some VNC encryption of some sort). -Nick
