"The terminal server has exceeded the maximum number of allowed connections."

Stupid machine, don’t give me an error, then kick off the person who can fix it! Well, until now, I was the stupid admin who didn’t know you could do this:

2003,XP SP1,2: mstsc /v:IPorHostname /console
2008,Vista,XP SP3: mstsc /v:IPorHostname /admin

to log into the physical console session. Sweet!

On a related note, if you want to view a session, you can use

shadow 0

to view that session (0 for physical console in Windows 2003). You will have to be authorized by the user that is logged in however, so no spying by default.

Note: Windows 2008 is better about managing additional log in attempts. If the max number of terminals is reached, the new connection can pick which user they want to log off, and the user about to be logged off has the option to allow, allow by ignoring, or deny the request.

Not that a hard reboot won’t do it either… kidding! But in all seriousness…