Andy’s Techie Blog » Blog Archive » Remotely disconnecting a Terminal Services Session

Remotely disconnecting a Terminal Services Session

Posted on April 1st, 2008 AndyParkes 5 comments

I tried to logon to one of my clients servers this morning and once I’d entered the user name and password I just got a blank screen.

I tried connecting to the console session and had similar luck. I’ve seen this one or two times before and normally a reboot sorts it out and I put it down to Terminal Services getting itself or confused

But I didn’t want to restart the server during the day as I’d have all the hassle of getting everyone to stop what they were doing and this particular site has lots of remote users

You can’t restart the terminal services service so what was I supposed to do?

I found this blog post,

Ingo Rammer’s Weblog : Remotely disconnecting a Terminal Services Session

I used

QWINSTA /Server: name/IP

to list the sessions

Once I’d identified the session I wanted to boot I used

RWINSTA sessionid /SERVER: name/IP

To remove the session

I was then able to log back into the server!

SBS, Terminal Services
5 Responses to “Remotely disconnecting a Terminal Services Session”
1. Paulie April 1st, 2008 at 12:10 pm
  
  This is useful
  
  I’ve had this problem a number of times.
  
  I have found that you can also work around it by specifying an initial program in the terminal services client and providing just “explorer.exe”
2. Nick April 1st, 2008 at 3:03 pm
  
  Also – if you’ve got more than one 2003 box with “Terminal Services Manager” installed at the client site, you can use it to manage terminal services on the problem box, and reset the connections through.
3. andyparkes April 1st, 2008 at 10:50 pm
  
  Thanks for that Paulie…another one to remember
  
  What i didn’t put in this post was i tried it remotely first (using an IP address) with no success. It just returned no sessions
  
  I logged onto a PC actually on the domain and tried it (using a name) and it worked
  
  I didn’t include this in the post as i did to experiment more to figure out why it didn’t work
  
  I’m suspecting authentication at the moment
4. andyparkes April 1st, 2008 at 10:50 pm
  
  Cheers Nick
  
  Your quite right and that would usually be the course of action i’d follow…but they just had the single SBS server
5. Howto: Remotely disconnect a Terminal Services Session « the back room tech April 9th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
  
  [...] to Ingo for some of the information, which I found via Andy. Posted in howto. Tags: howto, mstsc, RDP, Terminal Server, Terminal [...]
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