You will probably know Microsofts Tool to Manage Terminal Server, it’s called Terminal Services Manager (you will probably know it as TSAdmin). It can be used to view information about terminal servers including all sessions, users, and processes for each terminal server.

I’m currently working on a TSAdmin replacement (codename TSAdminEx). Purpose is to show how to use the Terminal Server API’s and as a little bonus we will add some extra functionality to TSAdminEx.

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This is an often asked question but the solution is simple:

So how does it work?
First we obtain the user’s primary access token with the WtsQueryUserToken  API call. To call this function successfully, the calling application must be running within the context of the LocalSystem account and have the SE_TCB_NAME privilege (LocalSystem has this privilege by default). Since the function returns a primary acces token we can just pass this to CreateProcessAsUser and voila!

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 Ever wondered how mstsc saves passwords? If you open an RDP file with a text editor like Notepad you can see the encrypted password. In this article I will show you how to encrypt and decrypt these passwords. Besides password recovery this enables you to create rpd files programmatically or perhaps update the password in many rdp files with a batch file.

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A little while ago I wrote a little commandline tool that starts an RDP connection (with mstsc.exe) because mstsc doesn’t allow you to use the login credentials (username, password) as commandline arguments.

Arguments are:

1. Servername (string)
2. Port (integer, usually 3389)
3. Username (string)
4. Domain (string)
5. Password (string)
6. Console (integer, specify 0 for false and 1 for true)
7. RedirectDrives (integer, specify 0 for false and 1 for true)
8. RedirectPrinters (integer, specify 0 for false and 1 for true)

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