Terminal Server License Expired

[chewyone]

We have a Windows Server 2003 machine which we installed a few months back. It’s being used as a SQL Application server. Terminal Server was installed on it and the warnings about licenses expiring have pretty much gone ignored up until today when I discovered that the license has indeed expired and I can no longer remotely log in.

Myself and one other person are the only two who remote login and we both use Administrator logon credentials, so Administrator Remote Login would be okay for us as that allows for two remote connections plus the console login.

It says in the Terminal Services Configuration page on the local machine that you can change to Administrator Remote Login via the Add/Remove programs console but the only thing I can do there is uninstall Terminal Server and then I get a warning that any programs installed after Terminal Server was installed, won’t work properly… A lot of stuff has been installed and configured over the past couple of months so Terminal Server is going to have to stay where it is I guess.. but I really need to be able to log on remotely.

Has anyone any ideas how I might be able to fix this..? Ta.

 

[cmartin75]

You can still connect at Windows 2003 remotelly with Terminal Server, on a console session. (only one connection at time)

To do this use the mstsc.exe with the param /console, in the StartUp menu, run.

mstsc.exe server /console.

 

[cmartin75]

Sorry!!

mstsc /console

and then choose the server.

 

[chewyone]

Thanks cmartin75, that does indeed work if you put it in like this:
mstsc.exe /v:server /console

That's only going to work as a temporary solution though as there would quite often be two of us that need to be logged in at the same time.

I didn't know that Terminal Services are supposed to be turned off when installing new programs either! If I'd known I could have disabled them while installing new software. So now I can't uninstall Terminal Services, and it seems thats the only way to get back to Administrator Remote Access. Surely there must be a way around it?

 

[itsp1965]

First of all, do you still need terminal services application mode to be enabled on this server? If so, then you will need to install and activate a license service which will solve the original issue
If you need to only enable TS for remote administration, then you can un-install Terminal services (regardless of the error). If you are only running this server as an SQL server, SQL server will not be affected by this and will continue to function.
HTH

 

[chewyone]

Hi itsp1965,

To answer your first part, no, we don't need the terminal services, all we need is the Administrative Remote Access.

The server is also an application server, this application uses SQL and has been highly customized over the past few months and if there is even the slightest chance that uninstalling terminal server might screw anything up, I won't do it.

Would there be any dirty way I could go about it like some registry modifications??