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Richard West
Asked: 2009-05-12 07:59:40 +0800 CST

Can not RDP to Win 2003 box or initiate remote restart

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I've got a Windows 2003 server that's at my remote data center. This morning I tried to connect to it via RDP, but the connection fails with the following error:

This computer can't connect to the remote computer. Try connecting again. If the problem continues, contact the owner of the remote computer or your network administrator.

I have also trying issuing a remote shutdown/restart command using the "shutdown -i" command from my local system. No error is reported, however the system does not reboot.

This server runs SQL Server 2005 and it is still fully operational and responsive to queries.

I can also remotely connect to the services control panel of the remote system.

Is there anything that I can try to regain control of the system, short of having an operator in the data center do a hard reboot on the server for me?

windows-server-2003 rdp

8 Answers

  1. I encountered the same issue trying to perform a remote reboot on a Windows XP machine. What I ended up doing was using the PsKill command, part of the SysInternals PsTools suite, to kill the Winlogon process, like so:

    pskill \\hostname winlogon

    This will cause the remote machine to reboot immediately.

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  2. Best Answer

    Try instead:

    shutdown -r -f -m \\hostname -c "Comment goes here"

    That's a bit drastic, but I've had the need to do that in a very similar environment to what you describe. I also open a cmd window and start a ping -t against the server to watch when the IP stack goes down and comes back up. This is a very useful indicator of activity when you don't have physical access to the server (or are too lazy to get up and walk over to it).

    EDIT: (based on your comment) Ok, do this first and then try the above again (or restart it as normal if this works). See it that gets you farther. The -a will abort a system shutdown.

    shutdown -a -m \\hostname
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  3. Well, this is kind of crazy but you can enable xp_cmdshell on SQL Server then execute commands as the user that is running SQL Server, so you can do a shutdown -r if it won't listen to remote commands.

    If you want to try and re-start RDP w/o rebooting the box, you may try (this is untested; I'm not going to do this on any of my boxes :D):

    Figure out what is listening on 3389 (RDP port) by asking for:

    xp_cmdshell 'netstat -anO | findstr ":3389"'

    Kill the pid with taskkill. Finally, issue a 

    NET START "TERMINAL SERVICES"

    Hold your breath, then try RDP again.

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  4. If you issued a shutdown/restart and the server just will not go down, you can kill the wininit.exe process with the pskill tool. In windows 2012, you can use taskkill native tool.

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  5. First check to always do whether you're sure of it, check if firewall let RDP go through ;) That's not stupid, It's just sometime happen out from nowhere ;)

    Also check that Terminal Service is on, and maybe try to reboot it if you have a chance to get physically on the server.

    This kind of thing also happen to me on my 2003 R2 server.

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  6. When Terminal Services stops working.

    This is less an answer to your question and more an explanation to what might have caused it. I have seen RDP stop working several times on Windows Server 2003, and it's usually occurs in one of two scenarios;

    1. Post-patching. The system is restarting after an automatic update, but never fully shuts down. Terminal sessions are logged off and no new connections are accepted, but the server (file, mssql, DC) keeps on working.

    2. This KB article CTX116901 describes a fault where the session image space is too small and it can't load any more video or printer drivers, (hence it being a problem for MetaFrame servers).

    To set the size of the session image space via registry key, try 

    reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management" /v "SessionImageSize" /t REG_DWORD /d 0x20

    Try values like,
    0x10 (16 Mb)
    0x20 (32 Mb)

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  7. I had same problem the PSKill worked like a charm - have looked for at program like this for ages - never knew that sysinternals had released one.

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  8. this is usually caused by a task that will not shut down, the server awaits the task shutdown in order to continue with the restart. you can solve this by finding the culprit task and remotely closing it. use: tasklist /s HostName usually SQL is the immediate suspect. use Taskkill to kill it, and the server will than carry on with the restart.

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