Remotely enable RDP

As in most of my posts, i assume the person reading this is working in a company, with all PC's on the domain, and that you are a domain admin (or at least have domain admin rights, even if that's not your job role).

So of course you will need local admin access on the remote machine (domain admins have that) and you will need the firewall not blocking everything.

There are many many different ways to do this.

you can open regedit, connect to a remote computer, and change the following key:

or on a local PC you can go to the cmd windows and type the following:

reg add "\\machinename\HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server" /v fDenyTSConnections /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

for the above to work to need remote access to that PC (file and print sharing enabled).

or you can PSEXEC to the remote PC and type a command like the above but with the machinename part.

or you can remote install VNC on the machine, the VNC to it, and then enable remote desktop.

or you can ring up the user and get then to do it.

or you can leave your desk, walk down 2 flights of stairs and do it yourself, maybe on the way to lunch or something.

or, set a group policy for it (apply it just to them it needed) and wait till they reboot.

Now, if you did of the first few ways, and the firewall is on, it will not add an exception for you. so the port will be open (you can just that via psexec \\machine cmd then netstat -ano |find /i "listening"). but you can add a firewall exception via the netsh command

netsh interface ip firewall add portopening TCP 3389 RemoteDesktop.

or maybe RDP was enabled the whole time, but the firewall was turned on AFTER is was enabled (this also does not add an exception), so use the above to remotely add an exception.