When remotely administrating Windows 2003 servers with Remote Desktop, you probably have encountered the problem, that the Terminal server has exceeded the maximum number of allowed connections.
To overcome this issue, you might have used the /console switch to Mstsc.exe to reach the physical console session, also known as session 0, and then throw of any hanging connections. A neat little trick, also described in a previous post.
But today it suddenly didn't work anymore, and I was kind of puzzled.
It would seem that Vista SP1 and XP SP3 has introduced RDC version 6.1, with some changes. The /console switch is now deprecated, and when calling it from the command prompt it is simply silently ignored - well, how helpful, a little warning message might have been nice.
Instead you use the /admin switch instead like so:
mstsc /v:<server> /admin
By using this switch against a Windows 2003 server you will connect to the console session, and against a 2008 server you will connect to the session that is used for administrative purposes, as you no longer need a console session with Windows Server 2008.
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