Managing Remote Desktop settings on a remote computer

An article I wrote almost four years ago is still generating a lot of discussion (see the comments beneath the article). The topic was about how to remotely enable Remote Desktop on a Windows Server 2003 machine, and it's a good example of a bootstrap problem: how can I enable Remote Desktop remotely so I can connect remotely using Remote Desktop. This and other crazy problems formed the basis of my book Windows Server Hacks, which documents 100 of these problems and how to solve them.

Reader John Nordien, who is the Server & Storage Architect at Manitoba Lotteries Corporation, recently contacted me concerning my article, indicating that he had written a script called SetRDP.cmd that takes the ideas espoused in my article one step further. John says his company has a corporate policy in place that says remote desktop should be disabled by default on all Windows computers. Naturally, a policy like this can make it difficult to remotely manage such computers. So John wrote a simple script that he could use to remotely enable Remote Desktop, perform his work on the remote machine, and then disable Remote Desktop again easily.

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