Gaining a session when all other sessions are taken…

I work in a fast paced IT company that services several clients in the area both remotely and on-site. When I work with remote clients I have to be able to help them quickly and efficiently at a moment’s notice if they call in for help. To do that I have to administer several Windows servers at a time and I will often run into one that doesn’t have a session available for me to log onto and thereby help the client out. By default servers will only provide two sessions at a time. Of those two sessions available, they can easily be occupied by the idle session of inconsiderate administrator (like myself on occasion) who will often disconnect rather than log off when they are done. Luckily, there are two reliable ways to get a session!

Option 1:

Jump on another server and open the Terminal Services Manager (start > administrative tools > terminal services manager) and connect from it to the machine you wish to access. From there you can see what sessions exist and then disconnect idle users.

Option 2:

You can use the “console” session. This is a somewhat hidden feature in the Remote Desktop Services. You have to call it from the command line with the “/console” or “/admin” option, depending on the age of the server (2008 servers use /admin). So, as an example you would go to: Start > Run > then type in “mstsc /v:server01 /admin” (without the quotes of course). This would open up to an RDP session to server01’s console, and the console connection attempts are never refused!

Written By: “Splashypants” @ Halski Systems in Gainesville, GA