RDP stops working – grace period issues – then 120 days later – no remote desktop license servers available to provide a license

RDP essentially has three modes:

1. Administrative power users
2. Per user
3. Per device

#1 cost you $0.

#2s and #3s costs forever monthly licensing costs so will make you poor

So power users use option #1. Option #1 is normally restricted to ONE USER ONLY, but with some registry hacking, you can have TWO USERS. This could save you thousands if only two users will ever log onto your system.

Alas! Our client contacts us. They are *not* using per user or per device, and now get this gem:

The Remote Desktop Session Host server does not have a Remote Desktop license server specified. To specify a license server for the Remote Desktop Session Host server, use the Remote Desktop Session Host Configuration tool.

This is confusing? We’re not spending $$$ at Microsoft, so what gives? We start researching. We find this, and it looks promising:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/remote/cannot-connect-rds-no-license-server

We read it through, a few times. It only mentions per user and per device, and not administrator. What now? More Google? More AI? More Bing?? Microsoft, pre AI, suffers from what I call the computer science doctorate problem. Their articles are super heavy overly complicated and never has a TL;DR. In the noise they skip basic 101 get your day done stuff. Good luck finding an  article that mentioned, per device, per user, and PER feaking ADMINISTRATOR.

Here was is the fix:

1. Log onto the server
2. Open the Command Prompt as an Administrator
3. Type regedit and press enter.
4. Navigate to the following key: HKLM/CCS/Control/TerminalServer/RCM/GracePeriod
5. Right click the GracePeriod key as you’ll be re-assiging the owner
6. Click Permissions
7. Click Advanced
8. Fiddle, and make the new owner something like Administrator. If there are groups involved, make them Administrators.
9. Delete the L$RTMTIMEBOMB

Have a nice day.

Before screenshot:

So 120 days go by. Around 4 months. Now the gems are even more bright.

Evidence A:

Evidence B:

Here we go looking for the damn reason again:

Solution:

Delete the darn time bomb again. Can some super computer science doctorate give me an answer about this please without throwing the book at me? Leave your comments below.