Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations Chriss Miller on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

cannot log into server via rdp/terminal services or console 1

Status
Not open for further replies.

johnrmcc

IS-IT--Management
Jul 17, 2003
49
US
Mistakenly, I setup our exchange server with rdp in terminal server mode, not remote desktop administration mode, so it locked us out after 120 days or so. The problem is now, that I can not log in at the console, as the monitor/keyboard/mouse were unplugged from the kvm switch, and will not come back up, and I can not get in via terminal services. At one point a few days ago, I was able to get in via remote desktop, and tried to reboot the server, but lost my connection, now the message I get when trying to connect is..."The cliend could not connect to the remote computer...remote connections might not be enabled or the server may be too busy to accept connections....." This is our exchange server (2003) and I really need to reboot it, get it back under control. I cant even do a remote shutdown command (says device is not ready) Does anyone have any other ideas, other than hard power down. I am afraid of corrupting exchange. I was thinking of shutting down all iis / exchange related services and then doing a hard power down, but its really not high on my list at this point.
 
Windows 2003 is a little different compared to Windows 2000. In Windows 2003, you don't have to install terminal services to enable "Administrative Mode" Terminal Services. Instead this is called Remote Desktop on Windows 2003.

It sounds like you probably wanted Adminitration Mode and didn't realize that this was automatically installed. However, you would have to enable Remote Desktop on the Windows 2003 server to use the functionality:

How do I turn on Remote Desktop?
A. Right-click My Computer, click Properties, and then click the Remote tab. Turn on Remote Desktop by selecting the check box Allow users to remotely connect to this computer. Designate users by clicking the Select Remote Users... button.

Although, if you can't get into the console, you won't be able to enable this...

I suggest that you try to restart your Remote Desktop service (on the problematic server) or even try to restart the Terminal Services service.

If that doesn't work, stop exchange and then hard reset. It would be very rare that your server would die as a result of this....Exchange is built to take hard hits every once in a while...There are several mechanisms to automatically recover from hard shut downs...

-later


Joseph L. Poandl
MCSE 2003

If your company is in need of experts to examine technical problems/solutions, please check out (Sales@njcomputernetworks.com)
 
Although, if you can't get into the console, you won't be able to enable this..."

Yes you can, if you have remote registry access. On another machine, open regedit, click on file, then connect network registry. Type in the name of the Exchange server and hit ok.

Then under that server, navigate to HKLM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server. Look for the fDenyTSConnections value. Setting that to 0 will enable remote desktop (this also works for XP machines).

"I suggest that you try to restart your Remote Desktop service (on the problematic server) or even try to restart the Terminal Services service"

Ther is no Remote Desktop service. And you can't stop or restart the TS service from the services console. A reboot is the only way to restart that service. But if you use my method above, you can avoid a reboot.
 
It's a long shot but try running mstsc with the /console switch (in other words start -> run -> mstsc.exe /console). Then try to log into the server as you normally would. Using the console switch will log you into the console through RDP and is not restricted by the 120 day Terminal Services limit.

If that doesn't work, as suggested above, remotely stop the exchange services (computer management works nicely for this) on the server then hit the reset button. If you can get the information store service to stop, you don't really need to worry about any type of data corruption. And if for some reason you can't access the computer management to stop the services, go into the Exchange System Manager and dismount the databases which will also protect you from data corruption.

Good Luck, I hope this helps somewhat.

Jon

____________________________________
I'm allowed one mistake per day, hopefully the suggestion I just gave wasn't it.
 
the only thing that wound up working was stopping the exchange services and hard rebooting. every which way of rdp / term services would not work. all is well now though, as i uninstalled ts, made sure rdp is enabled.
 
Cool...glad that you didn't run into a problem....Windows 2003 is pretty solid...later

Joseph L. Poandl
MCSE 2003

If your company is in need of experts to examine technical problems/solutions, please check out (Sales@njcomputernetworks.com)
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top