Windows 2008 Administrator Remote Access vs Windows 2003 Administrator Remote Access

I funny thing happened to me this morning. I was remotely connected to one of our w08 servers with our standard Administrator account when suddently my session came to a sudden end. I knew what must have happened, and sure enough one of my cohorts had signed on remotely to that server.

At first I thought it might be a limitation in w08 that you could now only have a single Remote Access connection, but I quickly realized that that was not the case. Instead the new tweak in w08 is that you can only sign on ONCE per account. So, when my cohort signed on with the same username it booted me off and handed my session over to him. This is new to w08, in w03 you could have sign on more than once with the same account and run different sessions.

The takeaway seems to be that you are going to have to have multiple Domain Admin accounts, probably assigning one per administrator. This will mean that you can have better security auditing (hopefully) but it also means that you will have more accounts that can do more damage.

Note that with the addition of User Account Control turned on by default this may restrict some critical tasks (see here).

Not a bad thing to have added to w08, just something to be aware of...