Remotely enable RDP

This morning I was stuck in what seemed to be a precarious catch22. I needed to make a remote desktop connection to a computer, but RDP was disabled. My first search of the web turned up a remote registry solution. Unfortunately remote administration of the registry was disabled by policy. Luckily it is possible to remotely enable "terminal services" without remote registry hacking as I learned in this blog post. You'll need a copy of psexec which you can download here, and you need to be logged in with an account which has local admin (at least) on the target. Then run the following command:

psexec \\machinename reg add "hklm\system\currentcontrolset\control\terminal server" /f /v fDenyTSConnections /t REG_DWORD /d 0

Then fire up mstsc and you're in.