Life of a techno-guru
Thursday, March 30, 2006
  Script to enable RDP
Today I developed a script that enables RDP on a remote computer. Unfortunately the script was not designed to take alternate credentials when making the connection to WMI, although I may do that at some point. Here's the story on how I came up with it:
This morning, I was planning on installing Exchange onto a test Windows Server at home to experiment with some settings. I popped the CD for Exchange into the drive of the machine, and left for work thinking I was all set to go. Well, the problem is that I installed Windows at the last minute before going to bed last night, so I didn't configure any options, namely, to enable remote desktop connections. So then I get to work, find out that I can't connect to it, and figure that I will simply edit the registry as usual using regedit from one of my other machines. Boy was I wrong; for some reason, regedit wasn't properly taking alternate credentials, so I had no way to connect into the machine. I attempted connecting to the administrative share of the machine, and was successful, so I knew I could at least copy files to it, and also that I had the userID/password right. So then I decide that the only way I'm gonna get on that box is to do something through the command line. As far as I know, there's no way to import a section of the registry with a command-line (although I'm sure there is), but what I do know is that cscript is a command-line interpreter for WSH. So I went ahead and wrote out this script, ran into a couple of problems, fixed 'em, then used psexec from Sysinternals to execute the script using cscript from the command-line. The nice thing about psexec, is that it allows you to submit alternate credentials, and it worked flawlessly. So all in all, it was a bit more effort than was really necessary, but I had no other choice except to be physically in front of the machine. It pays off to know how to script in Windows (and *nix I'm sure), because if you find yourself in a pinch, you've always got a way to get yourself unstuck. So without further to do, here's the script:

NOTE: If you use a utility such as psexec or something else to execute it on a remote machine, to enable it on that machine, simply pass a "." as the argument, which is a substitute for "localhost" basically.
'Author: Trevor Sullivan
'Date: March 30th, 2006
'Purpose: enable remote desktop from a script. This script
'can be used with psexec or other remote command line
'utilities to enable RDP.
'Usage: [cscript | wscript] enableRDP.vbs
set args = Wscript.Arguments

if args.count <> 0 then
enableRDP(args.item(0))
else
wscript.echo "Usage: [cscript] enableRDP.vbs "
end if

function enableRDP(pcname)
strNS = "root\default"
strcls = "stdRegProv"
strConn = "winmgmts:\\" & pcname & "\" & strNS &amp;amp; ":" & strcls
wscript.echo strConn

set objWMI = GetObject(strConn)
result = objWMI.SetDWORDValue(,"SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server","fDenyTSConnections","0")

wscript.echo result
end function


 
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My life of learning various things about technology including network administration, development, and 3D design

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