Remote Access – Terminal Server, Remote Desktop
For those of us who work remotely, telecommuting or, in my case, remote administration, being able to connect to work from wherever you are is quite important.
This week one of my clients could not access the terminal server at work because of Microsoft licensing. Now, we all want Microsoft, lovingly referred to as M$, to get the money they are due. But when that gets in the way of us using the product we paid for, it can get ugly.
“Terminal Server can not issue a license to your workstation, blah blah.” What it really means is that it WILL not. Since this user could get on with ANY OTHER PC, I figured it must have been something with his 6 month old Dell laptop, running XP. Link here.
After sorting through at least a dozen possible answers – hint to M$, this isn’t a rare occurrence, I found one that looked like it might apply.
What it boiled down to was to delete a key from the registry (after backing it up of course).
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSLicensing
That’s it. When you reboot – naturally, you MUST reboot – XP will simply recreate the key. In this case, it worked.
C’mon, guys. If it’s really that simple, why not have Remote Desktop just delete the darn key automatically JUST IN CASE that will work?
