Posts Tagged ‘Remote Desktop Services’

Terminal Server “The requested session access is denied” when you try to login

Friday, April 20th, 2012

I was working on this issue today with one of our team.  A client reported that they could not login to their Windows Server 2008 Terminal Server from their iPad.  He is using iTap on his iPad.  The error message we kept getting was “The requested session access is denied”.

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We verified that we could access the Terminal Server / Remote Desktop server using our Admin account and thought that maybe it was linked to the clients account.  He brought his iPad into the office and we tried the Admin account from the connection he had created.  It worked.  We then thought that we’d try it from a desktop using our admin account – that too worked, but when we tried it with his account it didn’t work.  Strange we thought – I mean we just launched mstsc.exe from the shortcut we had on our desktop…  After a little bit of digging and thought though, it finally clicked.  Access is denied… We checked and found that our shortcut used the /admin switch which meant that it would try to take over the console session on the server.  Given that we got the same message with both the desktop and the iPad, we then checked the iPad to see that it had a similar console option in the iTap configuration.  Changed that and sure enough it worked!

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Is the Remote Desktop Role really installed on SBS 2011?

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011

The default installation of SBS 2011 Essentials and SBS 2011 Standard, have the SBS setup process install and configure the Remote Desktop Gateway feature on the SBS 2011 server itself. Should you look at the roles installed you will find an anomaly as shown below. It appears that the Remote Desktop Gateway component is not installed when in fact it is. The screen image below shows the Remote Desktop Licensing service installed – this is due to the fact we have a separate Remote Desktop Server in the network I used to take this image from – it is not normally installed by default.

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The management tools for the Remote Desktop Gateway are also NOT installed. This is in fact by design as due to the unique configuration of SBS 2011, the tools could break the Remote Desktop Gateway configuration if they are run incorrectly, so the SBS team made the decision to not install them so as to prevent people from messing with the configuration.

There are however times when you need to install the tools to check the configuration – for that Microsoft have documented a way here

If you need to install the Remote Desktop Gateway configuration tool use the following procedure.

  1. Run a command prompt with Administrative privileges
  2. Run this command dism /online /Enable-Feature:Gateway-UI
  3. If you check the Remote Desktop program group under the Administrative tools group you will now find you have the Remote Desktop Gateway Manager tool available.clip_image003
  4. When you run the Remote Desktop Gateway Manager tool, you will see the following message on screen.clip_image004
  5. You can ignore this as the SBS setup has correctly configured it already.
  6. If you navigate the console you will also be presented with the following message – DO NOT CLICK YES… ALWAYS SELECT NO.clip_image005
  7. Once you have completed any inspection you might need to do here, it is recommended that you disable the tool again. You can do this via the Administrative command prompt with the command dism /online /disable-feature:Gateway-UI

The apparent absence of the Remote Desktop Gateway Manager tools and the appearance that it is not installed via the Server Manager Roles and features tool is incorrect as it’s due to specific SBS configuration as explained above. I would not suggest installing this tool as a standard practise as you cannot judge what the customer may do with it after you leave their premises. If they mess with this, then it may well remove your only way of access to the server and therefore require a site visit to resolve it.

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