SBS 2008 – Terminal Services Gateway server is temporarily unavailable

Here is one of those cryptic error messages when connecting to an SBS server via RDP:

Remote Desktop Disconnected

This computer can’t connect to the remote computer because the Terminal Services Gateway server is temporarily unavailable. Try reconnecting later or contact your network administrator for assistance.

Now, since we are the network administrators, we now need to figure out just what is going on.

The first instinct is the Internet connection may be down. But, when we bring up the Remote Web Workplace (RWW), the site is there.

Try and log onto the RWW, and this is what we are greeted with:

RWW: Password change needed

If we did not try and log onto RWW, the next logical step would have been to troubleshoot what was going on with the TS Gateway service in the logs.

Once into the server, the TS custom view in the Event Viewer had no errors whatsoever.

In our custom logon failure Event Viewer Custom View (SBS CodePlex) however, we found the following:

An account failed to log on.

Subject:
    Security ID:        NETWORK SERVICE
    Account Name:        SBS$
    Account Domain:        MySBSDomain
    Logon ID:        0x3e4

Logon Type:            3

Account For Which Logon Failed:
    Security ID:        NULL SID
    Account Name:        MyUserName
    Account Domain:       

Failure Information:
    Failure Reason:        The specified account's password has expired.
    Status:            0xc000006e
    Sub Status:        0xc0000071

A quick run through the logs produced the above. We made sure that all of the services were happy before accomplishing the folder recovery we needed to and then logged off.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

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