Here’s a tip about something I “re-learn” every few months. Perhaps writing it down will help me remember?
If your job has you working with Windows Servers, you no doubt are well familiar with the Remote Desktop Protocol. Windows users have Remote Desktop Connection (RDC), linux users can use tsclient/rdesktop and I’m sure there are other options as well. Why get up and walk to the server room (or drive to the data-center) when you can just fire up RDC and get a session on the server?
Thing is, you may have messages, errors or assorted other dialogs on the server’s console. Traditionally, you’d never see those. Thus, I’ve always had a bit of a “belt and suspenders” approach for my servers and install UltraVNC as well, just so that I can keep an eye out for console messages.
With Windows 2003 servers, there’s a much easier way. From a command line, type:
mstsc /v:servername /console
and you’ll be connected to console of that server.
I remembered this, yet again, earlier today when I found the Remote Desktop gadget for the Vista sidebar. I spend most of my days in remote desktop sessions and this is nice little “accelerator” for me.
The gadget has two checkboxes. The rightmost is for full screen. The left one is for console (my mouse was hovering over it in the picture to the right). Very handy.
Oh, and if folks have already tied up the two “admin” sessions alloted per server, you can use this to grab that remaining console session without having to leave your seat.
If only there was a way to add the “/console” capability to Windows 2000 servers as well.
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August 17th, 2007 
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[...] week I mentioned the nifty ability of Remote Desktop to connect to the console on Windows 2003 servers. As part of that, I mentioned the command line [...]
[...] in August, I wrote about how you can use Remote Desktop to connect to the console of a Windows 2003 server. It can be a helpful little trick, especially when using the [...]