Enable Terminal Server on a remote machine
June 25, 2009
Well, sort of.
This is an old howto that I apparently missed. I really know so little about Windows administration that finding gems like this makes me really excited 
Anyway, it’s possible to connect to a remote machine’s registry, alter the data in it, then remotely reboot the machine so that it can come back up with the server running. That’s pretty smooth!
Here are the details.
I know I’m missing tons more stuff like this. What are your favorites?
Posted in remote management, terminal server, windows
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June 25th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
1) Don't forget to turn off the firewall or otherwise permit inbound connections on TCP port 3389.
2) Ensure that there is no power setting that is going to leave the PC in standby mode when you want to RDP into the PC six hours later.
June 25th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Bad url link in you post.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
@Anonymous
Thanks for the tip, but I'm not seeing it. At least, I'm able to get to the O'Reilly site I linked to. What happens when you click on it?
June 25th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Forgot…
3) Under the right conditions, Gencontrol can get RDP enabled without having to reboot the PC.
June 25th, 2009 at 10:07 pm
A long time ago when I did Windows Admin (Win2k mostly) I would use the Registry to enable Telnet w/ntlm auth then use "Computer Management" to connect to remote server to start the Telnet and/or RDP service.
This can all be done via WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation)
June 26th, 2009 at 1:48 am
Take a look at winexe, it is a handy tool for poking windows boxes from Linux if you need.
June 26th, 2009 at 3:16 am
I can't imagin how to administer a win box wihtout logon remotly.
June 26th, 2009 at 6:08 am
A very useful tool is the WMI Object Browser (its part of the MS WMI Studio). You can use it to make system changes via WMI (e.g stop-start-delete-add services, inspect detailed system info etc..)
June 26th, 2009 at 11:17 am
If your on the same domain as the Window PC you can remotely deploy UltraVNC (or WinVNC) using psexec and a registry file.
I wrote a script that does for me and find it incredibly useful.
June 27th, 2009 at 11:10 am
If you have a windows domain, the STRCM tool (http://www.systemtools.com/strcm/index.html) is extremely useful.
The idea is that you have a config file that tells strcm to connect to the remote windows computer and it pretty much does a remote installation of vnc or any other software, and then follows up by making a connection using vnc or any other software.
So we don't leave vnc server installed on all of our computers all the time, we use strcm to add,view,remove on-demand — just put in the hostname or ip address and away it goes, as long as the machine is joined to the domain.
This is actually an open source component of the commercial program called Hyena, which I can also recommend.
June 27th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
@Everyone
Thanks very much for these great suggestions. I'm going to be checking these out throughout the coming weeks. I really appreciate all the feedback!
@Sam
Wow, that's a very cool tool. I'm surprised that's not used more. I'll definitely be looking into that, thanks!