Just Talkin Bout Stuff

Teaching an old dog…..

I thought that I pretty much had windows terminal services well in hand.  Well, I would be wrong.  Due to a couple of needs my clients have expressed, I needed to be able to get to the console of a windows 2k3 server from a remote location within the corporate network.  They really didn't want to be running down to the server room every time a change needed to be made on an application that can only have one console.

I know, I know, I know, but the architecture of the app is not the point of this post.

The client already has a ton of VNC, which is usually my choice to do this type of stuff, but I thought that maybe it could be done with RDP.  I first tried to just remote control the console session from within tsadmin.

That was a bust as there was some sort of permission problem that didn't readily trigger a neuron or two as to where the switch was.  So I did what every system admin type worth his salt does, I went to googling.  After a very short search(1st or 2nd hit on the page), I found that I wasn't the only one to ask this question.  This KB article made me think that I need to go read the documentation again.  It does exactly what I wanted.  Give me control of the console

I have some issues with VNC(ultra, tight, etc....), but it still does a really good job and I will continue to use it.  Since Terminal Service Client is installed(or can be easily) on every machine that I have access to, I will probably use this more and more.