Connecting to the Windows 2003 Console
on 03.21.04, 04:14pm in windows • comments (0)
Found this old entry up on Joe Bork’s weblog, which proved to be extremely useful this week:
Ever wanted to connect to the console session of a Win2k3 box via RDP? With XP, this is the default behavior, because only one interactive user can be logged in at a time. But 2k3 allows multiple ineractive users (and even the same user multiple times), so connecting via RDP and logging in as the console user just creates a new session and leaves the console alone.
Here’s a trick to let you remotely connect to the console session:
Start mstsc.exe and enter the settings for the computer you want to connect to
Save this connection to a file like “foo.rdp”
Open this file in Notepad (it’s just a text file anyhow)
Add a line to the file that says “connect to console:i:1″ (no quotes)
Save the changes
Presto! When you launch the foo.rdp file and login to the remote system, you’ll connect to the console session. Have fun.
[Update] John provides this information in the comments: “‘mstsc /v:machine-name /console’ I think it picks up the other settings from Default.rdp.”
