Archive for February, 2013

Remotely Enable Remote Desktop in Windows 7 Professional

Friday, February 22nd, 2013

I recently needed to login to a computer on a LAN that did not have Remote Desktop enabled. Here are the high-level steps that I took.

If you search online, you will typically find references to a registry setting to enable RDP.

Specifically:

HKLM Hive  -> System -> CurrentControlSet -> Control -> Terminal Server > fDenyTSConnections  should be changed to zero.

See: http://pctech.blog.ca/2012/04/07/enable-remote-desktop-connection-in-windows-7-using-regedit-remotely-13444092/

That’s not sufficient in most cases.

You also typically need to allow Remote Desktop through the firewall. I did this using Sysinternals psexec tool to get a command prompt to the remote machine.

i.e. psexec \\remote-computer cmd.exe

Then running a netsh rule to enable RDP:
i.e. netsh firewall set service type = remotedesktop mode = enable

 

Also, I needed to add the user to the local computer’s Remote Access user’s group (not the exact name).

A reboot was required.

See:

netsh firewall rule:  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc736451(v=ws.10).aspx

psexec: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/sysinternals/bb897553.aspx