Really strange TS connection problem

[Chris]

I have a set of workstations at a remote job site trying
to connect to terminal servers at our main office. The
remote job site uses a satellite internet connection and
Linksys router. There are two servers at the main site -
server1 is the ts licensing server and server2 is the
application server. Here's my problem:

Several workstations at the remote site can't connect to
server2; they get this error:

The client could not establish a connection to the remote
computer.
The most likely causes for this are:

1) Remote connections might not be enabled at the remote
computer
2) The maximum number of connections was exceeded at the
remote computer
3) A network error occurred while establishing the
connection

I've tried just about everything. I've used both the XP
and 2003 remote desktop clients, I've rebooted all
networking hardware, taken all other computers off the
remote network, swapped out cables, reloaded the OS.
Other machines are able to make the connection just fine,
and some of the problem workstations can make a
connection to server1, just not server2. At the same
time those workstations can make a connection to server2
when using another internet connection like a cable modem.

At this point I just can't make any sense out of this.
Doing away with the satellite internet is not an option,
but I don't think that's really the problem since other
clients are able to use it successfully. I really need
some help with this. Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks

 

[Guest]

It realy sounds like a network problem.
how are your network setup at the remote location?

Tell us more about you server setup, what os are you running etc.

/Rickard

 

[Chris]

The ts server is an IBM running Windows 2000, pretty
basic - PII, 750+ RAM, SP4. We're able to get multiple
connections to the box normally, just not with a couple
machines at this site.

The site is also pretty basic - the machines connect via
newly installed (and tested) Cat5 cable to a Linksys
cable/dsl router w/ 4 port switch. No config changes
have been made on the Linksys aside from changing the
admin password. Connected to the cable port on the
Linksys is the satellite modem.

The only thing between the two networks is a PIX and
Cisco 1604 router, but I doubt those are part of the
problem. All in all it's about as vanilla as it gets.
This give you any ideas?

Thanks,
Chris

 

[Guest]

Can you check the Terminal server log if there is any error log for the clients that can´t connect.
Can you ping the Terminal server from those clients?

/Rickard

 

[Chris]

I can't confirm the ping right now, but checking the
system log yields several of the following errors:

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: TermService
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1004
Date: 6/22/2004
Time: 9:03:26 AM
User: N/A
Computer: WBSRV2
Description:
The terminal server cannot issue a client license.

I can't be completely sure that these errors occur when
the problem machines try to log on, but some of them
certainly do correspond to times that I was there
testing. This could be a lead, but the workstations are
W2k which means they have built-in TS CALs. What do you
make of it?

Thanks,
Chris

-----Original Message-----
Can you check the Terminal server log if there is any

error log for the clients that can´t connect.

 

[Guest]

Thats what I thougt,

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSLicensing
Delete this key on the client, reboot the client and the key will be recreated.
You must also change the permissions so users can write to the MSLicensing key before you make a new remote desktop connection.


/Rickard

 

[Chris]

Thanks a lot, Rickard. I'll give that a shot ASAP and
let you know how it goes.

Chris

-----Original Message-----
Thats what I thougt,

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSLicensing
Delete this key on the client, reboot the client and the key will be recreated.
You must also change the permissions so users can write

to the MSLicensing key before you make a new remote
desktop connection.

 

[Chris]

Hey, Rickard, you're a genius, man. That worked for the
most part, with a couple strange exceptions:

I deleted that key, then restarted, but the key wasn't
recreated until I made my first connection attempt. That
attempt was successful, but subsequent attempts failed
with the same error as before. I looked at the
permissions to that key - the logged on acct is part of
the local admin group, which has full access to the key.
Still, I couldn't make another connection.

What I could do is delete the key before each
connection. As long as the key didn't exist, then I
could make the connection every time - definately weird.
As a workaround I created a .reg file that deletes the
key - the user can run that first, then make the TS
connection. That's good enough for me, but I'd still
like to know why this is happening. Any ideas?
(Hopefully you're still checking in on this thread).

Thanks for the help,
Chris