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Strange Screen, Keyboard, Mouse Behaviors When Connected to a VM

Abstract

This article covers a few of the strange keyboard, video or mouse behaviors that can affect graphical (RDP) connections to your Virginia Cyber Range virtual machine (VM), along with fixes or workarounds to address them.

Why is My VM Exhibiting Strange Behaviors?

If you encounter unexpected behaviors like your mouse moving on its own, your keyboard typing by itself, or a black screen when attempting to start an exercise environment, please rest assured that you have not been hacked. While issues of this nature rarely happen to users of the Cyber Range, it can sometimes occur. Some of these behaviors are related to known RDP library issues or related to virtual machine connection issues. However, the fixes are usually simple and quick.

Troubleshooting Environments

  1. Refresh Your Browser: For any issues, always try performing a browser refresh first, as it is the quickest fix and resolves most RDP/graphical connection problems. Refreshing the browser forces the JavaScript RDP web client to re-establish a connection to the Cyber Range virtual machine, resetting the RDP connection. To do this, click the refresh button of your browser or use a keyboard shortcut such as Ctrl+Shift+R or F5.

  2. Restart Your Exercise Environment: If the browser refresh does not work, restarting your exercise environment may help. However, this fix is more disruptive, as any open work will be closed when your virtual machine reboots. Use the Cyber Range Stop and Start (power off/on) buttons next to your virtual machine. Please refer to the section titled How to Perform an Exercise Environment Soft Restart for more details.

  3. Reinstall Your Exercise Environment: If restarting your environment does not resolve the issue, you may need to reinstall your specific virtual machine environment. This is a more extreme measure that will erase and rebuild your virtual machine environment to its original state, causing all saved work to be lost. This method is also useful if the virtual machine has been altered in a way that makes it unusable. Please refer to the section titled How to Reinstall an Exercise Environment for more details.

    Tip

    Only Instructors and TAs can perform exercise environment reinstalls by default. If you are a student and your instructor does not have student reinstall enabled, please reach out to them for further assistance.

Have a Question? Contact Support

Important

Students, please reach out to your instructor who can submit a ticket to our Support Team on your behalf.

We're here to help you. If you still have questions after reviewing the information above, please feel free to submit a ticket with our Support Team and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.