server 2008

How to Fix rdesktop disconnect: Internal licensing error on When connecting to Windows Server 2008 - Ubuntu Linux

If you use rdesktop to gain access to a Windows Server 2008 Terminal Server from Linux, you may experience the following error:

rdesktop my.terminalserver.com

Autoselected keyboard map en-us

disconnect: Internal licensing error.

This happens when your terminal server is Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2, the licensing mode is set to "per device", and you are using rdesktop 1.7.0 or less. There are two ways to resolve this error. You can either set the licensing mode to "per user", or you install rdesktop 1.7.1. rdesktop 1.7.1 includes a patch for the problem connecting to 2008 terminal servers with "per device" licensing.

To fix error on Ubuntu Linux, install rdesktop 1.7.1:

sudo apt-get install libx11-dev libssl-dev

wget http://iweb.dl.sourceforge.net/project/rdesktop/rdesktop/1.7.1/rdesktop-1.7.1.tar.gz
tar -zxvf rdesktop-1.7.1.tar.gz
cd rdesktop-1.7.1
./configure
make
sudo make install

​You may have to close and open a new terminal window before you run rdesktop again, but you won't receive the error any more.

***Note***

There are a couple of workarounds for this problem that have surfaced, but they are all outdated as of rdesktop 1.7.1. Do not use these workarounds, as 1.7.1 fixes the issue. Here are two of the work arounds:

New Forest/Domains/Child Domains with Server 2008

 We will be installing and setting up a new domain controller by using dcpromo.exe. I think Microsoft has done a really good job at making this process pretty easy. That is unless something goes wrong when trying to remove one and you have to end up manually remove the domain controller (we won’t get into that for this article).

1. First you will goto Start -> Run -> Then type in: dcpromo

2. Now a dialog box will popup like the one below and will check to see if the Active Directory Domain Services binaries are already installed. If they are not then you will see another dialog box saying that it is currently installing them after the check.

dcpromo

3. Now the wizard should be started aftering checking/installing the binaries. There is an advanced mode that you could choose but for this article we will be leaving it unchecked. If you check the box you will get some more options like creating a new domain in an existing forest, but adding it to a new Domain Tree. Normally when you create a new domain it will be a child domain under the Forest Root Domain (which we are creating now)

dcpromo1

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