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I'm running into some issues that overlap both server administration and application development (in this case game dev), and want to clarify whether such questions are fitting for ServerFault before I go posting any. I'll elaborate on my particular scenario, but this is also a question about overlapping questions in general.

We recently set up a Remote Desktop session farm to enable our game developers to do work from home. It actually works surprisingly well in general, but we have encountered situations where our games under test exhibit strange behaviour. These issues look very much like bugs in our game engine, yet cannot be reproduced outside of RD sessions.

Because we're developing the engine in-house, we can't dismiss the possibility of it being a programming error on our part - in which case this obviously isn't the right Q&A site. However, the specificity of the problem to RD suggests that it may be a server technology issue - in which case this site seems more appropriate.

I'm one of the devs but I'm also in charge of the RD farm we're using (we're a small shop). I'd like to know if questions of this sort are appropriate and useful on ServerFault, or if Stack Overflow or Game Development are more appropriate sites.

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  • Can you reliably reproduce the 'bug'? You might want to contact Microsoft.
    – Zoredache
    Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 8:14
  • @Zoredache I'm going to try them. Reproduce, yes - isolate, not yet. I'm planning on first installing some third-party graphics apps and games onto a session host first to see if the problem is reproducible outside our own products, since otherwise MS may just blame our engine.
    – Deep Thought
    Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 9:47
  • I think Chris gave the answer to the general question - now you can take the specific question to the appropriate site (not serverfault)
    – Niels Brinch
    Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 19:47
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    One last note: Keep in mind that your game probably will require some aspect of RemoteFX in order to run on a remote desktop. This means you should be at least Server 2008 R2+SP1 and preferably Server 2012, and your devs should have the matching remote desktop client.
    – Michael Hampton
    Commented Mar 1, 2013 at 5:19
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    @MichaelHampton Very good point. We are using Server 2012 and KB2592687 on the clients, and had to do so to get decent performance for this sort of thing.
    – Deep Thought
    Commented Mar 1, 2013 at 7:23

1 Answer 1

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For the most part, if your task has anything to do with development it's going to be off-topic on Server Fault. We cater to System Administrators (et al); who are performing administration tasks. In an ideal situation the software lifecycle is cleanly divided among creation (developers), installation (engineers), on-going maintenance (administration), retirement (engineers), and "feature" improvement (developers). As you've found, it's never that simple.

The answer to your situation depends on what you hope will resolve the issue. If you hope it's a configuration issue with Remote Desktop, then it's an administration issue. This is unfortunately unlikely. If you hope to be able to modify your program so it performs as expected over RD, then it's programming/development. That's suited for SO. In either case if your problem is assessed by the site to be on the wrong site, they can migrate it. You can even expedite this process by flagging a question (SF mods are quite responsive with a respond time average <40 minutes; and it's <15 minutes during work hours UTC-5).

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  • Treat it as though it is a bug and investigate it as such. You should eventually find either the bug in the game engine, or an obscure note on MSDN saying "don't try this on a Remote Desktop unless you..." or something along those lines.
    – Michael Hampton
    Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 4:27
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    Thank you for the breakdown. My initial interest is basically whether or not other people running similar apps over RD have encountered this sort of behaviour. That might help qualify it as either a development issue or an RD issue. Mind you, I'm thinking most admins want to stop people from using games on their session hosts, not the other way around, so the relevance might be limited.
    – Deep Thought
    Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 9:52

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