Alexander’s Blog

You can manage multiple Remote Desktop Connections with RDCMan, a utility that has been around for a long time. Unfortunately, Microsoft didn’t make this tool widely available for several years. Fortunately, Microsoft’s Symon Perriman pointed out during his presentation at my Seattle Windows Networking User Group a couple of days ago that a new version is available from Microsoft. It’s version 2.2 that was posted on 5/27/10.

RDCMan manages multiple remote desktop connections. It is useful for managing server labs where you need regular access to each machine such as automated checkin systems and data centers. It is similar to the built-in MMC Remote Desktops snap-in, but more flexible.

Supported Operating Systems: Windows 7, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista

Users using Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 will need to obtain version 6 or newer of the Remote Desktop Connection client software.

You can download RDCMan here.

Telnet Client is not installed by default on Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista, or Windows Server 2008. The procedures to install Telnet Client vary based on the operating system you are using. Microsoft has documented the following instructions on TechNet in this article.

To install Telnet Client by using a command line.

1. Open a command prompt window. Click Start, type cmd in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER.
2. Type the following command: pkgmgr /iu:”TelnetClient”.
3. If the User Account Control dialog box appears, confirm that the action it displays is what you want, and then click Continue.
4. When the command prompt appears again, the installation is complete.

Managing your workstations and servers remotely has become a necessity these days. Here’s a comparison of remote desktop software on wikipedia that you may find helpful.

Click on the image below to see the complete comparison of remote desktop software for various platforms.

The Shutdown command can be used to remotely restart or shutdown a Windows 2000 or later computer.

For example, you can remotely reboot a Windows 7 computer from a Windows XP computer as long as you have administrative privileges. On the destination computer, you may need to ensure that your account has the user right “Force shutdown from a remote system.” You can run gpedit.msc at the Start, Run and then add your account to that user right, as shown in the screenshot below.

The shutdown is especially handy for Network Administrators and PC Support professionals in a domain environment. Here’s the syntax used by the shutdown utility.

C:\> shutdown /?

Usage: shutdown [-i | -l | -s | -r | -a] [-f] [-m \\computername] [-t xx] [-c "comment"] [-d up:xx:yy]

No args                 Display this message (same as -?)
-i                      Display GUI interface, must be the first option
-l                      Log off (cannot be used with -m option)
-s                      Shutdown the computer
-r                      Shutdown and restart the computer
-a                      Abort a system shutdown
-m \\computername       Remote computer to shutdown/restart/abort
-t xx                   Set timeout for shutdown to xx seconds
-c “comment”            Shutdown comment (maximum of 127 characters)
-f                      Forces running applications to close without warning
-d [u][p]:xx:yy         The reason code for the shutdown
u is the user code
p is a planned shutdown code
xx is the major reason code (positive integer less than 256)
yy is the minor reason code (positive integer less than 65536)

To restart a computer make sure you use -r, to shutdown the computer use -s. As mentioned earlier, the shutdown command can be used on a local or a remote computer. To restart a remote computer use -m \\computername. For example, if you have a computer that’s hung on a certain process and you can’t even remote desktop into it, you can try to restart the computer remotely and force running applications to close without warning by using the following command.

shutdown -m \\computername -r -f

If you want to use the GUI version, simply type shutdown -i to bring up the graphical interface. Here you can add, one or more computers, configure the option to Restart, Shutdown, or Loggoff, display a warning notice on the computer, configure the computer to reboot after a specific interval, and configure the option for Shutdown Event Tracker that will record the reason for the action in the Event Viewer.

I mentioned at the beginning of the article that you can use Shutdown utility on Windows 2000 and later computers. Microsoft’s KB article 317371 explains how to use Shutdown tool in Windows 2000. However, notice that the older utility used a forward slash (/) instead of a hyphen (-) for the switches.

Remote access policies are local to the Windows Server 2003 where they are created. Therefore, you cannot synchronize remote access policies between servers. In addition, because remote access policies cannot be integrated with Active Directory, they can’t really be replicated as part of Active Directory replication.

If you have more than one remote access server, rather than administer the remote access policies of all the remote access servers separately, you can configure a single server with the Internet Authentication Service (IAS) as a Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) server and configure the remote access servers as RADIUS clients. The IAS server provides centralized remote access authentication, authorization, accounting, and auditing. This provides a powerful way to centralize remote access policies, especially in large distributed environments.

When you configure the properties of the server running Routing and Remote Access, select RADIUS authentication as the authentication provider. Once the remote access servers are configured to use RADIUS authentication, the remote access policies stored on the remote access servers are no longer used. Instead, the remote access policies stored on the IAS server are used. Therefore, if one of the remote access servers contains the current set of remote access policies that are applied to all of the remote access servers, you can copy the remote access policies to the IAS server. Click here for the step-by-step procedure for copying the remote access policies to another server.