A friend of mine asked me this tonight as its stumped him. I’m not really a windows/systems guy, so we went to google. However, I was unable to get a definitive answer, so thought I’d ask here on the off chance someone on this board knows the answer on a sunday night at 10pm…not much of a chance, I admit.
Anyway, here’s the question:
My friend has set up a Windows 2003 server, and is running terminal services on it to allow remote administration of the server. I set up a VPN connection via his firewall, so he wants to remotely manage the server via the VPN. In Windows 2000 you got 2 ‘free’ sessions if you configured the server as in Remote Administration mode instead of Application mode (I’m doing this from memory so don’t quote me if I’m wrong). In Windows 2003 appearently there isn’t two modes you can choose from…only one now (I think anyway). Anyway, my friend installed terminal services and now is getting the following message:
"The remote session was disconnected because there are no Terminal Server License Servers available to provide a license.
Please contact the server administrator. "
I think my friend is screwed and is going to have to fork out some cash for a terminal server license…that SEEMS to be what the google article I found says. The question is, am I right? Is there any way with Windows 2003 server to set it up so you get the two ‘free’ administration mode licenses…so you don’t have to pay for Terminal Server licenses? Any help or links to relevant articles would be much appreciated. I’m getting ready for a rather large trip out of the country so I can’t really help my friend too much on this…and I’m more an infrastructure engineer in any case…I gave up the systems stuff long ago.
Actually, this is a good question - you access in a different way with Windows 2003 unless you pay for Terminal Licensing.
What you want to do is to (on the server) go to Control Panel -> System -> Remote -> Check Allow Users to remotely connect to this server -> and (here is the part I always forget) click on Select Remote Users and add the users that can connect. Administrator, at the minimum, because by default they have the “Log on Locally” access in local security.
That should be it - make sure port 3389 is open in your router/nat or whatever connection route, and then give it a go.
Thanks RevCo…I talked to my friend, and he says he’s done all this already. Its been working for 3 months now, and only stopped working on friday, giving him that error message.
If you can think of anything else, by all means let me know. My friend is desparate NOT to have to buy a license for this, as its not a clients server but his own he remotely manages while he’s on the road…translation: HE would have to pay for the license.
Oh, hey, after first installation it will work via Terminal Services for 120 days (90 days?) - kind of a trial mode - if he checks the Event Log when he tries to connect, it’ll say the same thing or something to that effect.
He was still connecting via Terminal Services. Now it won’t work. Have him uninstall Terminal Services and Terminal Service Licensing and I believe that should work, but using it the old way won’t work without paying. The CALS are about $79 each last time I bought some for a company - relatively cheap for the amount of service you get, but he doesn’t want that, so I’ll leave it alone.
Has he tried REALVNC? It’s free, platform independent, and pretty robust. I use this when I have terminal services. Uses a different port, but very straightforward.
Ok, great. I’ll have him give it a shot…and THANKS RevCo! This is one I didn’t know about at all, as I havent done much more than play with Windows 2003.
Damn, I was just popping in to say “just use VNC, it’s free” but got beaten out. So I’ll offer tips instead.
One feature is that if you connect your browser to
http:\ target.ip.address:5800
it will download a Java based VNC viewer for you. You don’t even need a client.
Remember that until(I think) version 3.3, it does not encrypt the stream, especially passwords. If you are opening it up to the internet keep that in mind. My only other complaint with it is that there is no file transfer capability, and if you set your VPN like I did, there is no internet access for any VPN users while connected, so no downloading updates/patches/drivers etc.
Crap. forgot to mention, if you use the Java-in-a-browser viewer, bring a sandwich. It’s slow as crap, but if that’s all you got, it’s workable, and better than nothing.
My friend says he’s going to give it a shot tomorrow to uninstall Terminal Services and Terminal License and see if he can then get into the system via Remote Desktop. I assume thats what he needs to do anyway based on RevCo’s post. For my own information, could someone tell me how it works without Terminal Services running? Is it just a hook thats inbedded in Windows 2003 so that you can remote console? Is this ‘feature’ even documented? I had a bitch of a time getting any good data on this on google tonight…all the articles I pulled up basically said was ‘buy a license’.
I told him about REALVNC, but he wants to make this work with Microsoft only stuff for some reason…he’s basically being stuborn I think.
It works exactly the same but only allows two concurrent users. Microsoft’s white paper has some information.
For Server 2003 they changed the name of “Terminal Services Remote Administration Mode” to “Remote Desktop for Administration”. “Terminal Services Application Server Mode” is now just called “Terminal Services”. The only important differences are where you enable them (see RevCo’s post), and that mapping of client local drives now works correctly. Oh, and permissions have to be set differently, but you don’t have to worry about that if you’re only logging on as administrator.
Hmmm…on our server, we get 3 logins available at a time. We run into this problem when someone logs in and doesn’t log out, just lets the session timeout. When that happens I have to log in via our web-based java app, open terminal services, and log out all users (except for myself, which is the green icon) .
If everything has been working right for a while then just started giving this error, I would check into getting those users logged out somehow to free up available logins.
Thanks for the info Number…I like to keep my hands in, even when I’m not doing systems type work anymore. Its good to at least pretend to stay current. I’m going to print that white paper and read through it.
ZipperJJ, I’m pretty sure he checked to see if users were still logged in. This was a license error, and I think its been explained that my friend simply installed Terminal Services incorrectly for what he was trying to do…i.e. he shouldn’t have installed Terminal Services at all to put it into Adminstrator Mode. By installing Terminal Services (appearently) this puts it into the old Application Mode, which needs a license after 120 days.
Thanks everyone for the explainations! Appreciated.
