Disconnect Remote Desktop Sessions

Thanks to Scott Forsyth, I found a way to disconnect remote desktop sessions when you are unable to connect to the server via RDP…  Apparently qwinsta and rwinsta are built-in to Windows (XP Pro at least).

Scott said:

qwinsta /server:12.12.12.12

Where 12.12.12.12 is the IP address or name of the non-accessible machine.

This will display something like this:

> qwinsta /server:12.12.12.12
 SESSIONNAME       USERNAME                 ID  STATE   TYPE        DEVICE
 console                                     0  Conn    wdcon
 rdp-tcp                                 65536  Listen  rdpwd
 rdp-tcp#470       Bob                       1  Active  rdpwd
 rdp-tcp#471       Jane                      3  Active  rdpwd

Now I know that Bob and Jane are the two that are logged in.  Since Jane left the office 20 minutes ago I know that she forgot to log off.  I don’t know where Bob is but I only need one session so I’ll ignore him for now.

To disconnect Jane’s session I would type this:

rwinsta /server:12.12.12.12 3

Notice the 3 which is the session ID I found from using qwinsta above.