We were doing a round of upgrades in our Windows estate and we found that one of the Windows 2000 server had a broken terminal service.
All the following checked out, but the server was just not listening on port 3389:
- terminal services is running (reboot server like a gooogle times) and not error in eventlogs
- no other applications is locking 3389 preventing it from being used
- no ipsec policies was set
- no ipfilter was configured.
- when I run tsadmin on the server (obvious remotely won’t work), I could see my only session
In other words, the server is behaving just like all other normal Windows 2000 servers with a working terminal service.
Then while reading one of the resources off google search, I decided to have a look at the network adapter settings in the RDP-TCP properties in tsconfig.
Strange enough, it listed 2 network cards, but one of them was a NC7770 card, while we had only NC7778 cards on this server. So, I double checked device manager (with show hidden device option) for the card, but it does not exists. But when I did a search of the adapter name in the registry, I could find that the original network registry values are still in the register. The card is identified to be sitting on the PCI bus 3 and bus 3 shows its empty. So ideed its a phantom card.
The default network card settings on RDP-TCP to use “All adapters configured for this protocol” and my guess is that the server must have picked the NC7770 to bind the protocol to it and hence it did not work
So I chose the correct network adapter applied the settings, rebooted the server and terminal services is working correctly again.
P.S. I am definitely sheduling this server to be rebuilt to Windows 2003..
