A Windows System Admin's Blog

Covering Server Administration, Endpoint Management, Scripting and Network Management

Remote Desktop is Blocked in Windows Firewall even though Group Policy Setting is set to allow

,

So I’m going through and trying to automate a lot of things in our environment (one thing you should always try and do as a SysAdmin is to automate repetitive tasks) and to help me achieve this I’m using Group Policy, step one is enable Remote Desktop to all of our Servers automatically. Created the Group Policy Object, allowed Remote Desktop Connections and also setup a list of IP Addresses to allow connections from.

After a while I added another IP Address to the exemptions and the next morning I found that I was no longer able to RDP directly to some of my servers, wondering what had happened I logged into our Hyper-V host (where RDP was still working) and I logged onto one of the affected servers. I firstly went and checked to ensure that RDP was still enabled, yup sure is, I then went and checked the Firewall and I spotted a Block and Deny All rule that I was sure I didn’t create. So I went back over the GPO that I had applied, went into the IP exceptions and turns out there was a SPACE separating one of the IP Addresses after the comma.

Removed that space, performed a GPUpdate on the affected machines and Remote Desktop started working again.

 

Leave a Reply

More Posts

Setting Up Geo-Blocking with FortiWeb IP Protection

One of our FortiWeb clients is releasing a new app and they’ve requested us to block IPs not associated with Australia.  There are a number of ways we can achieve this whether it’s via the FortiWeb, a FortiGate in front or other methods. In this instance, we’ll be using the FortiWeb IP Protection feature. This […]

Aruba Switches and Trancievers

Vendors tend to lock down the type of transceivers you can use on their SFP/SFP+ and QSFP ports. They do this for a number of reasons but mainly in the spirit of support and quality (which I can understand). there are a number of guidelines around agreed upon by networking vendors that fall under Multi-Source […]

How to easily Check your SPN and Delegation settings for SQL Server in an Active Directory environment

I was recently setting up some Linked SQL Servers for a customer to perform queries against a database on one server through another. One of the things you need to get right when setting up linked servers when using Service accounts in Active Directory is SPNs (or Service Principal Names) and Authority to Delegate (for […]