Terminal Services Gateway in Windows Server 2008

 Executive Summary:

Terminal Services Gateway in Windows Server 2008 encapsulates Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) within HTTPS (HTTP Secure) and provides users the ability to connect to the TS Gateway server by using HTTPS's port, TCP port 443. Learn how to configure and deploy the TS Gateway server and configure a TS client.

Windows Terminal Services (TS) lets users run applications on servers and administrators fully manage remote servers by connecting to the servers' desktop through RDP. In this article, I describe a new feature of TS in Windows Server 2008 called Terminal Services Gateway (TS Gateway), which lets you securely establish a terminal session with a remote machine over the Internet by using HTTP Secure (HTTPS).

How It Works
No matter if you're talking about remote administration of or running applications on remote servers, you have a potential security risk when you expose these resources to the Internet. If you want to make a server accessible via RDP to remote clients, you can use several approaches. You can open TCP port 3389 on the firewall and forward requests from Internet clients to the private IP address of the TS server in the local network. However, besides the fact that opening port 3389 can pose a security risk because it directly exposes hosts to the Internet, you also need multiple public IP addresses if you want to make more than one internal host available. . . .