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Managing Server Core with RDP

Thursday, 24 January 2008 by Michel Roth

The beauty of Server Core is it's tiny footprint. Server Core owes these small feet to carrying as little baggage as possible. Unfortunately this also means not carrying the RDP protocol. So if you need to get to that machine without walking up to the console or using some form of KVM, you need good ol' RDP. But how to enable it in Server Core? Sander Berkouwer knows how.

The first thing Sanders teaches us is that Server Core only supports one concurrent connection via RDP. This is different from a "normal" installation of Windows Server 2008 where 2 concurrent connections are allowed. Sander talks about several ways to enable Remote Desktop on Server Core like a special VBscript (SCregEdit.wsf), by editing the registry or plain old Group Policy.

One of the things you need to think about in Windows Server 2008 is that the Windows Firewall is enabled by default. The aforementioned first method to enable Remote Desktop automatically opens up the appropriate port (still 3389). The other methods require you to open the appropriate ports manually. Sander also explains how to create an "ISA like" rule to only allow certain Windows groups to use the 3389 port trough Windows Advanced Firewall.

Read Sander's entire article.