I have been looking into Windows Home Server because it has some nice features. I haven’t received my copy yet but a coworker picked one up last week and has been struggling through some challenges with remote control. The first problems of course come from WHS and the appropriate ISP and firewall rules… but the second was that anything other than Vista Ultimate or the business flavors don’t allow RDP.

Here’s an email I received this morning:

Ok. It took me a while but I got remote desktop
working to my Vista home premium box via the WHS remote access
website. Here it is in case you need it:

1) Use the hack here to enable inbound RDP to Vista Home Premium:
http://portal.tonychan.org/Default.aspx?tabid=58&EntryID=123

* Make sure you run the batch file as Administrator or it won’t work

2) Open 3389 in the Windows Firewall or whatever FW client you’re
using on the Vista box

3) Configure Remote Access on the WHS. On your router, configure
Port Forwarding for 80/443 (or custom ports if your ISP is blocking
80/443, i’m using 8008 and 4430) and 4125 to the WHS IP.

* If you do use the custom ports for 80/443, edit the IIS default
ports on the WHS to match

4) Lastly, built in logic on the Remote Access webpage will not allow
a RDP connection to Vista Home unless you do the following (it’ll keep
telling you Not Supported even though the hack is working perfectly):

The specific registry key that controls the display of the “Not
supported on this operating system” message on the Homeserver Remote
Access web page is:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE

\Microsoft\Windows Home
Server\Transport\Clients\{id for client machine}]

“TerminalServicesSupport”=”Yes”

which =”Yes” for supported operating systems and in the case of Vista
Home Premium =”OS”. (Set it to “Yes”)