Remote Desktop for Administration in Windows Server 2008 Core
In yesterday’s article I wanted to write about how to enable remote desktop for administration in Windows Server 2008 Core, but I thought it would be best to treat this as a separate article since the target audience for it might be different. The process to enable RDP it’s pretty straight forward and I will outline it in the following steps.
Ensure your Windows Server 2008 Core install has a valid IP address if you are unsure of this you could issue the ipconfig command to review your settings. If you are receiving an APIPA (Automatic Private IP Addressing) address tipically 169.x.x.x, you will need to configure a valid IP address on your box that is reachable in your network to do this.
In the above screenshot you see the results of this command and you only need to remember the Idx number or the complete name of the network interface you want to configure.
Now you can set the IP address of the network card with the following command netsh interface ipv4 set address name=”<ID>” source=static address=<StaticIP> mask=<SubnetMask> gateway=<DefaultGateway> and finally you add the DNS server you wish to associate with this interface if deemed appropriate with the command netsh interface ipv4 add dnsserver name=”<ID>” address=<DNSIP> index=1 if you need to add an additional DNS server issue the same comamand but modify the index to 2, 3 and so on depending on the number of DNS servers you want your interface to query.
Once this is complete you need to review the current settings for remote desktop this is done running the following command
C:\Windows\System32>cscript SCregEdit.wsf /AR /v
If you see “1″ in the script output, that means that remote desktop connections will be denied. To change that you need to run the following command
C:\Windows\System32>cscript SCregEdit.wsf /AR 0
Now we need to review the status of inbound firewall rule that manages connections via RDP port 3389, to do this we run the command netsh advfirewall firewall sho rule name=all, this command will show the status of all current rules in your list find one called RDP desktop (TCP-in), it might be useful to pipe this command with the more option to view a paused display of the output, the format for that command would be netsh advfirewall firewall sho rule name=all | more, you advance thru by pressing the spacebar and you can stop it using the control + c key sequence.
To set the rule to allow this type of traffic we issue the command netsh advfirewall firewall set rule name=”Remote Desktop (TCP-IN)” new enable=yes and that is it! We are done configuring remote desktop for administration on our core install of Windows Server 2008.