Remotely enable Remote Desktop to connect to a remote PC

Occasionally you need to get something done on a remote computer (or a clients computer) but the computer doesn’t have an easy way for you to connect to it. Luckily, if you have admin rights to the remote computer, you can still connect without needing to turn on remote desktop before hand. To do that you will just need to download a little tool called PsExec (Available here). PsExec is a Microsoft tool part of their PsTools, the beauty of it is that it is portable and can be run from anywhere.

Once you have PsExec download you just need to open a command prompt and browse to the folder with psexec.exe. Once the command prompt is open, type in this command and it will enable remote desktop on the machine you specify.

psexec \\machinename reg add “hklm\system\currentcontrolset\control\terminal server” /f /v fDenyTSConnections /t REG_DWORD /d 0

Make sure you replace “machinename” with the computer you are trying to control remotely. Once this command has run you should now be able to connect with the Remote Desktop client (mstsc.exe) to the remote computer.

Fix client machines not appearing in WSUS Console

Depending on your imaging method some clients may not show up on your WSUS console, and refuse to check for updates. Since starting my new job I’ve seen this occur on machines which have been imaged with a non-sysprepped image. I quickly whipped up a script to reset some settings and forcing the machine to contact your WSUS server and retrieve a new Client Id and thus show up in your console.

Dim objShell, strKeyPath, strValueName,strComputer

set objShell = wscript.createObject("wscript.shell")

const HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE = &H80000002

strComputer = "."

Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set objRegistry = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\default:StdRegProv")

strKeyPath = "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate"
strValueName = "SUSClientIdReset"


objRegistry.GetStringValue HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, strKeyPath, strValueName, dwValue
IF (dwValue = "1") Then
            'do nothing
      Else
            objRegistry.DeleteValue HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,strKeyPath,"SusClientId"
            objRegistry.DeleteValue HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,strKeyPath,"SusClientIdValidation"

   Set colServiceList = objWMIService.ExecQuery ("Select * from Win32_Service where Name = 'wuauserv'")

   For Each objService in colServiceList
     If objService.State = "Running" Then
     objService.StopService()
     Wscript.Sleep 10000
     objService.StartService()
     End If
   Next
        objShell.Run("wuauclt /resetauthorization /detectnow ")
   	Wscript.Sleep 10000   
        objShell.Run("wuauclt /r /reportnow")

        'Set reg value for SUSClientIdReset for checking against later.
   	dwValue = "1"
        objRegistry.SetStringValue HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, strKeyPath, strValueName, dwValue
End If

Run that on the effected machine with Admin Rights and the client will eventually appear in your WSUS Console.

As for the cause, the master image was joined to the domain and tested. During that time received group policy settings which included WSUS and contacted the server settings it’s clientId.

Hope that helps.

Check to see if your KMS can be contacted

Sometimes when deploying computers in our organisation, they don’t see our KMS server and automatically activate (even though they are told to do so via our unattend.xml). 9 times out of 10 it’s the client itself having issues just talking to your KMS server. To check and see if you can contact it, you can perform a DNS lookup for the KMS Host. Open a command prompt window and type in the following:

nslookup -type=srv _vlmcs._tcp.<FQDN>

replacing the <fqdn> with your fully qualified domain name. It will look up the DNS record which the Software Licensing service checks to contact a KMS host. From here you can try and ping the machine using the above DNS entry.

You can also use some other commands on the KMS host to ensure that it is working correctly and accepting clients and activating them. Opening an elevated command prompt window on your host machine you can use the following:

slmgr /dli
slmgr /dlv

These two commands will show you detailed information about your KMS host machine such as the number of failed/successful activations as well as client counts.