Terminal Services Can't Be Restarted

Published 02 September 04 12:59 PM | alexcampbell

Welcome to another chapter in the long "Microsoft thinks its customers are idiots" book.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=278657  (Terminal Services Cannot Be Manipulated)

It is not possible to restart the Terminal Services service when it crashes, as it inevitably does.  I'll have to reboot the machine, a live server with hundreds of sites on it, in order to get Terminal Services (Remote Administration mode) to come back to life. 

The KB article above lists this behaviour as "By design".

Does anyone know a hack around this?  Or the twisted Microsoft reasoning behind this decision?

Comments

# Jeff Atwood said on September 1, 2004 11:56 PM:

I like to use VNC or something similar as a backup solution.

At least, when I'm not reading blogs all day...

# Alex Campbell said on September 2, 2004 01:43 AM:


VNC has hung also - I would usually use it as a last resource in this situation.

I hate VNC with a passion reserved solely for slow, frustrating, CPU intensive Windows applications.

# Alex Campbell said on September 2, 2004 01:46 AM:


VNC also amazes me because it is able to reduce a machine with gigabytes of RAM and several 64 bit processors to the speed of a 486DX 66mhz with breathtaking ease.

# Jeff Atwood said on September 3, 2004 05:29 PM:

You have to use the version of VNC that hooks the video driver-- otherwise it has to use a brute force method to "guess" what areas of the window have changed.

I use TightVNC which has such a video hook driver. But yeah, without that, it's kinda painful. Remote Desktop is good stuff, but you need a backup.