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Posts Tagged ‘Windows Server 2003’

Reboot Windows Server 2003 Using Remote Desktop (RDP)

Friday, July 18th, 2008

Since Microsoft updated their Windows Server 2003 software, administrators relying on their Remote Desktop Connection are having difficulties rebooting.

When connected via RDP, if you reboot normally you will be disconnected from the server and all will appear well.  Sometimes, however, the server won’t actually reboot!  Furthermore, it will block all incoming connections to RDP, and to everything else.  The only means of recovery is rebooting from the console.

Solution

It is possible to use our knowledge of the command line to perform a proper system reboot using the shutdown command.

The relevant switches are:

/f – Force the shutdown even if other users are connected

/r – REBOOT, rather than shutdown

/t 0 – Set the timer to 0 seconds, i.e. perform the command right away

Example:

reboot /f /r /t 0

I hope this helps prevent some head-scratching!

“Connection to Server Reset” when Installing Drupal

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Has anyone else had this issue?

When I try to install Drupal on a Windows 2003 Apache server, I get a pause and then “Connection Reset” error under Firefox.  If I then try to install it using Internet Explorer, the installation process comes up immediately and works without a hitch.

I still can’t seem to get the admin ‘Modules’ page to load at all – PHP is crashing.  That is an entirely separate issue as far as I can tell.

Apache: Enabling mod_rewrite on Windows 2003 Server

Monday, April 21st, 2008

Recently I had to set up a WordPress blog on a Windows 2003 server, which involved installing Apache, PHP and MySQL.  Everything went pretty well – except for the typical PHP.ini problems I shall write about later.

Once the database was set up and I had the blog running, I tried to adjust the permalink structure using .htaccess rewrite rules so they would be more human-readable.

Out of the box, mod_rewrite isn’t enabled on Windows Apache.

The steps I took to resolve the problem were:

  1. Uncomment the line containing ‘LoadModule mod_rewrite modules/mod_rewrite.so
  2. In the VirtualHost directive hosting the blog, add ‘AllowOveride All
  3. Restart Apache

It works like a charm, now.  All the tools ship with Apache, it’s just a matter of configuring them as needed.

404 Errors when Accessing ASPX Pages on Windows 2003

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

By default, windows 2003 Server is locked down and won’t display ASP.NET pages.

To enable them you must set its status to Allowed within the Web Service Extensions of IIS.

How To Send Ctrl+Alt+Delete Using Terminal Services

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

In order to change my password on a remote Windows 2003 server, I recently needed to send a Ctrl+Alt+Del sequence to the host. By default, doing this sends that sequence to your own machine.

To send the command to the hosting server, type Ctrl+Alt+End.