Tag: Remote Desktop Services

Server 2012 R2 Licencing Problem

I’ve seen a problem on a few servers, where they have been fully configured to use a licence server with available CALs, but after a time still report that there are no licence servers available to use. The servers had been configured to talk to the licence server by following the process Microsoft document at the link below;

Guidelines for installing the Remote Desktop Session Host role service on a computer running Windows Server 2012 without the Remote Desktop Connection Broker role service

Everything appears to check out, and I know the licence server is being used by other Server 2012 R2 servers for their CALs, so I know essentially the licence server is working. The server appeared to just not be using the licence server details I’d given it and simply falling over when the grace period ran out.

The solution was found in the registry, with the following key;

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\RCM\GracePeriod

After removing the binary value in there and only leaving the default string and rebooting the server, the servers would check in to the licence server. I had to take control of the registry key to make this happen, and then revert the permissions back after I’d finished.

Some people have reporting seeing event ID’s 1129 and 1130 in the TerminalServices-RemoteConnectionManager event log, but I didn’t see these in all cases.

Unable to perform Remote Desktop Services installation – Unable to connect to the server by using Windows PowerShell remoting

When starting an RDS farm install today I was presented with an error saying that the server could not be connected to via WinRM, which was odd as the server giving the error was the machine I was running the install from. A screenshot of the error is below;

rds_install_winrm_error

I did a little Googling of the problem and found a number of posts reporting this was related to IPv6 and that the fix or workaround was to disable IPv6. In my eyes this isn’t a workaround, Microsoft do advise against disabling IPv6. So, after a little more thinking about this, I wondered how the WinRM listeners were configured, and in particular the IPv6 listeners. Surprise, surprise, the IPv4 listeners were configured, but the IPv6 listeners simply were empty in Group Policy. An empty listener address range in policy means those listeners are disabled. Configuring these correctly in the policy and restarting the server then allowed the RDS installation to proceed.

Microsoft do give some detail on how to configure this setting and I just thought I’d share, as disabling IPv6 shouldn’t really be a fix for anything.