Baffling Remote Desktop Issue

Soldato
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Got an odd misbehaving server (win2003) at work, and I can't work out why or how to fix it. For some reason remote desktop isn't running, even though the service is there for it and its setup to run. No errors are visible in the error log either. Telnetting to port 3389 doesn't return any kind of prompt, just terminates with a connect failed. Telnetting to port 80 shows the webserver is running fine on it. This is affecting telnetted connections from remote points or even local connections done on the server to 127.0.0.1. At the moment we've chucked VNC on it so we can try and resolve this issue remotely but we want to remove that and get RDP running again. Is there any way to uninstall RDP and re-install it? I can't see any obvious options to do this with. It was running at one stage in the past and has suddenly stopped for no obvious reason.
 
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Only thing I can think of (and not being able to telnet into port 3389 confirms this) is that it's a firewall issue? Perhaps a Windows Update has tightened this up as a security hole? Does explicitly opening up port 3389 help matters any?
 
Associate
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I had something similar on our Windows Server 2003 (well, SBS2003 but similar) server recently - is your box running SP1 & with all latest windows updates?

I ask because I think a recent one may have screwed things up & needed a reboot to help things along... That wasn't the complete solution though - can't narrow it down to one thing really but:

Check the Terminal Services service and MMC - RDP ties into Terminal Services in Remote Admin rather than Application Mode

Do you have/need the RRAS & Windows Firewall services running?

Check the event logs for any failed services - seem to remember on our box ntdll.dll was causing some problems with RRAS and Windows Firewall - replacing it with a version from a backup helped.

Just some thoughts really, dunno how much help it is.
 
Soldato
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M0KUJ1N said:
Only thing I can think of (and not being able to telnet into port 3389 confirms this) is that it's a firewall issue? Perhaps a Windows Update has tightened this up as a security hole? Does explicitly opening up port 3389 help matters any?

Definately no firewall setup on the box thats handled seperately by a proper firewall rather than a software solution (much safer that way)
 
Soldato
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I've had this on several of my 2K3 boxes. Disable RDP (Right click on My Computer, Properties, Remote, Untick 'Enable Remote Desktop....').

Reboot, then enable it again.

No idea why, but every case I've seen (apart from 1 where someone changed the RDP port in the registry to 80 which really upset Apache) that has sorted it.
 
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