Ctrl-Alt-Del in Remote Desktop Connection Window

Ctrl-Alt-Del in Remote Desktop Connection Window,Remote Machine, Keyboard Shortcuts

Ctrl-Alt-Del keyboard shortcut has been commonly used since IBM PC with DOS era to perform soft reboot, and used in modern Windows system to activate Winlogon process (log on to Windows NT), open Task Manager or Windows Security dialog box that allows user to log off, lock computer, shutdown PC, run Task Manager, switch user and other functions.

However, whenever trying to trigger Ctrl-Alt-Del function on remote system connected via Remote Desktop Connection, the keyboard shortcut combination pressed will bring up the Ctrl+Alt-Del function on the local machine instead of the machine remotely logged on via RDC.

This behavior is by design though, as Ctrl-Alt-Del key combination is too important for any PC (to run especially when computer encounters halt error or hang). As such, Ctrl-Alt-Del keyboard shortcut is always reserved for local host computer.

In order to send Ctrl-Alt-Del keystrokes to remote computer connected via Remote Desktop client, just press the following Key combination:

Ctrl+Alt+End

a work around keyboard shortcut specially for Remote desktop machine.

Remove grid lines in remote desktop

Computer Tips,Remove grid lines in remote desktop, Remote desktop issue

I am having been of late developing a Soft ware package in .NET Framework 3.5 for the LegaSync Project, to migrate the data from various legacy ERP systems (SAP,SYTELINE,MACPAC,MANMAN,JDE etc) to SQL server. when it came to production deployment, the client had hosted a server with the latest configuration ( Windows Server 2008 R2, which was a 64 bit machine.)

One of the client from an ERP had faced the issue of  getting annoying gridlines in her remote desktop sessions while logging into the remote machine. It was occuring regularly during every session. Sometimes it will take the entire window and other times it will only occupy a sub-area.

If you use Remote Desktop to remotely manage servers you might have probably ran into a situation recently where you've connected to a remote server and noticed grid lines or occasional "stray pixels" on your RDP window. This is due to a minor incompatibility between Windows Server Terminal Services and older versions of the RDP client.

Fortunately, the solution is very simple. Just download the Remote Desktop/Terminal Services Client 6.0 and install. You can find it here:



http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=26F11F0C-0D18-4306-ABCF-D4F18C8F5DF9&displaylang=en

Log off Remote Desktop Users

There are serveral DOS commands to forcibly log off the remote user. But we need to be an administrator of the target machine.

How to query for users on a machine?

First we can query to find out what users have a session on a remote machine? Windows provides the "quser" command which we can use to query for the sessions running on that machine.

The format is as follows:

quser /server:ServerName

Here is a screenshot running this command against a remote machine. Notice that it shows the User Name, state and ID of the session.

Query Users on a machine

How to log off a user of a machine?

How can we force the  user to log off. There is a handy little command called "logoff" that we can use to force a user to log off a machine based on their Session ID.

The format is as follows:

logoff SessionId /Server:ServerName

Log off User

Notice that I have used the Session Id which I got from the above.

Note: If you remotely log off a user, their log session goes away which could mean the unsaved data is lost, or if the user in the middle of an activity, we might be in trouble.


Of course some things are easier to do using a script:


Here is the VBScript code, which allows the user to remotely log off.

strComputer = ""

Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")

Set colOperatingSystems = objWMIService.ExecQuery ("SELECT * FROM Win32_OperatingSystem")

For Each objOperatingSystem in colOperatingSystems

ObjOperatingSystem.Win32Shutdown(0)

Next

Save the code in .vbs format and execute it.