Brian Hartsock's Blog

A common problem with Windows servers is remoting. Unless you pay a large amount of money, you can only have two terminal services connections per server for administration purposes. Sometimes people leave the office and accidentally stay connected, which ties up a connection and means no one else can connect.

Since most of our development and live servers are accessed remotely, this quickly becomes a big problem. Luckily, I found an article that can help in this situation. I know any Windows sysadmins out there have probably known about this for a long time, but I haven’t. Since I am in charge of a few development servers, I need to know these tricks.

UPDATE: Much better advice from Sebastian.

Hi Brian,
I’m a Windows and Linux enterprise admin and software developer.
tsshutdn will restart the server. Instead you can just ask who’s connected executing “quser /server:YOURSEVER” from another terminal server.
Once you have the current sessionID numbers on the server, you can log them out with the command:
“logoff /server:YOURSERVER SESSIONID”.

I hope this helps you.
regards,
Sebastian.


tsshutdn <wait_time> /server:<server_name> /reboot /delay:<log_off_time> /v

This will disconnect everyone remotely connected and then reboot terminal services.

Over the past few years, I have installed Windows Server on a handful of our development machines. Every time, I follow the same steps except it didn’t work to well this time.

Somewhere in the mix of releases and service packs, a major naming change occurred that I had no idea about. In previous versions, to enable remote desktop, I would just install terminal services which would run in administrative mode by default. This allowed 2 simultaneous connections from administrators which is what I needed.

When I installed terminal services this time, it ran for 120 days and then proceeded to stop accepting connections because it required a licensing server. It was obviously not running in administrative mode. What I soon realized was, terminal services in administration mode is now called remote desktop for administration. Instead of being part of terminal services, it is now separate which means it is installed differently.

To get it up and working, just follow this simple guide.