Remote Desktop Blank Screen and Solution

[spunwicked]

Fixing black screen after logging on via remote desktop for Windows Server 2003

A few a days ago I was delivering a full day of training to a client of mine, and I made the mistake of leaving a remote desktop connection to my Windows 2003 server logged on (as admin). This would usually present no issues but in this instance it caused a bit of a headache.

At lunchtime, I went to log on to my server via remote desktop and after logging on I got a blank black screen. You can imagine my heart pounding at this point. Was my server about to die? I took precautions and checked all services were running normally (which they were thank god!) and decided to back everything up from there via FTP there and then. The backup took 3 days, but better safe than sorry.

I trawled the web looking to see if people had had similar issues, and found nothing of value. Luckily I had a secondary admin account set up so I decided to try logging into the server using that. Success!

I opened task manager and went to the 'user' tab and lo and behold, their was admin, still logged on. I logged the original admin account off and logged out of my secondary account.

Then I started a new remote desktop session, logging in as admin and everything worked as it should.

I can sleep easy now!

 

[DQuaN]

Yes indeedy. You could have tried Ctrl+Alt+End which sends Ctrl+Alt+Del to the remote computer.

 

[spunwicked]

Yes indeedy. You could have tried Ctrl+Alt+End which sends Ctrl+Alt+Del to the remote computer.

Nice tip - will remember that, thanks Dunk 👍

Writing software is enough of a mission without having to keep on top of server admin too. If in doubt, next time I will post my issue here!

 

[wfooshee]

Your server doesn't have a local scheduled backup running automatically?

Task Manager is not the best place to find another account logged on. Terminal Services manager is where you should be. You can find a list of logged in users, with the login time, idle time, etc. Right-click the one you want to kill and pick Log off. If it happened to be a Citrix server, you would even see whether the session was RDP or ICA.

3 days of FTP?!?!?! Really??!?!?!

Were you training a client on your server with an admin login??!!?!?!

You've got some best-practices reading up to do, I think ....

 

[spunwicked]

@wfooshee

Scheduled backups running every morning at about 3am, including sites and full DB back ups. I was referring to downloading it all to my development PC.

3 days of FTP for almost 1 million files. Really.

I was training a client on my dev PC (rare one to one training day). I was logged onto my server in the morning and let the session time out. My client and training had nothing to do with being logged onto the server.