Locked out of Windows Server 2012

An issue I had a while back was a development lab version of Microsoft Windows Server 2012 locking me out via RDP or any other means due to RDP licensing and a grace period expiring.

It was not a server in my room but a proper rack mounted headless server.

Diagnosing what was wrong took ages but it turns out the fix was to delete a registry key and rebooting the server.

Being a good devops guy I scheduled a task to delete that key again and reboot the server so this would not happen again.

All good!

Then today the same thing happened. nightmare

What happened to my my scheduled task?

Well I had a reg delete batch file which was also configured to run with elevated privalages so everything was setup to run correctly, however the kicker was on rebooting, the admin account I was using lost it’s full control access to the registry hive.

For now with an elevated regedit I gave the admin account full control to the parent node and this should be enough.

Later I will look at setting the permissions via the batch script before running the reg delete command but i will check the next time it reboots.

So for those looking for the key to delete here it is:

reg delete "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\RCM\GracePeriod" /f

It is a known bug it seems.

I have a blog post road map but this was such a gotcha I wanted to document it!

Cheers