Tag: Terminal Services

Server 2012 R2 Licencing Problem

I’ve seen a problem on a few servers, where they have been fully configured to use a licence server with available CALs, but after a time still report that there are no licence servers available to use. The servers had been configured to talk to the licence server by following the process Microsoft document at the link below;

Guidelines for installing the Remote Desktop Session Host role service on a computer running Windows Server 2012 without the Remote Desktop Connection Broker role service

Everything appears to check out, and I know the licence server is being used by other Server 2012 R2 servers for their CALs, so I know essentially the licence server is working. The server appeared to just not be using the licence server details I’d given it and simply falling over when the grace period ran out.

The solution was found in the registry, with the following key;

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\RCM\GracePeriod

After removing the binary value in there and only leaving the default string and rebooting the server, the servers would check in to the licence server. I had to take control of the registry key to make this happen, and then revert the permissions back after I’d finished.

Some people have reporting seeing event ID’s 1129 and 1130 in the TerminalServices-RemoteConnectionManager event log, but I didn’t see these in all cases.

Unable to connect via RDP to a Server 2003 R2 server

I came across a problem today with a rather aged Server 2003 R2 server. I rebooted it as part of some troubleshooting, and after the reboot found I was unable to connect to the server via RDP. So, I jumped on the VM console to check various things, the Terminal Services service was started, but I did force a stop of this and start it again. Checked over the registry to ensure the listening port hadn’t been changed for any reason. Checked the terminal services configuration to ensure the connection wasn’t disabled and there were no strange limits imposed on the connection, but all looked normal. I did try disabling and re-enabling the connection, but still no luck. When I did a netstat -ao and looked for anything listening on 3389, there was nothing at all listening, no Terminal Services or any conflicting service was listening on port 3389.

In the end, after a bit of a search on Google and a bit of checking, one suggestion mentioned was to re-register the Terminal Services DLL. So using the following command regsvr32 remotepg.dll I tried this and the registration failed. Tried to un-register it first with regsvr32 /u remotepg.dll but again this failed. So, I came to the conclusion there might be a problem with the DLL. So, I copied the DLL from another working machine, un-registered and re-registered the DLL again, which succeeded this time round. Then after a reboot, I was hopeful, but still no joy. Final, checking the Terminal Services configuration again I noticed that now the connection was disabled, right clicking and going to All Tasks and enabling the connection, I was then able to connect via RDP. Success