How do I lock a remote desktop session so others stop disconnecting me?

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Remote Desktop: Prompt before logging off user

We have 1 xp machine that serveral people can remote desktop to. It is logged in at all times as just one user, which we all use the same login details for.

The problem is, that we never know when someone is currently connected or not. So we end up kicking the other person off, which is not very nice thing to do but more importantly they could be in the middle of something crucial.

I wondered if there was a way to prevent others from connecting once there is and RDP session already established? Or even better a way of prompting the user that someone is trying to connect, allow/dissallow kind of thing?

Solution

If you can afford a Windows Server license, it sounds like you should really be using Windows Terminal Services for this.

If that won't work, there do exist workarounds to enable multiple remote desktop sessions simultaneously on Windows XP. Since it's unclear how that sits with Microsoft (they provided the feature in a beta version of SP2, then removed it - people subsequently hacked the beta files into the current versions of XP), I won't link to it, but if you look, it's not too hard to find it out there.

Comments

[slugster]

Of course we shouldn't tell you about the super sneaky /console argument that you can use with RDP that can be very handy on a WinXP machine.

[Tim Robinson]

Maybe stop using a workstation OS for a server? Windows Server handles this fine.

[hyperslug]

Yes, with Windows Server you get 2 whole logons before it starts kicking people off. If you're actually trying to compare Terminal Server + tscals with Windows XP, the slight price disparity might be the reason for using XP as a server.