The terminal server has exceeded the maximum number of allowed connections. The system can not log you on. The system has reached its licensed logon limit. Please try again later.”

This problem happens because Windows only allows two remote terminal services connections when you are in administrative mode, and you’ve either got two people already on that server, or more likely, you’ve got a disconnected session that still thinks it is active.

The problem with this error is that you have to actually get on the server console to fix the problem if the server isn’t in a domain. (If you are in a domain, then just open Terminal Services Manager and log off or disconnect the sessions)

Here’s a command line arguments that you can use to figure out what sessions are connected to the server. Note that you could substitute the IP address for the server name.

query session /server:servername

Output:

Now we know that the session ID of the offending session is 2. We can use that in the next step, which is using the reset command to log off that user.

reset session [ID] /server:servername

This command won’t display any output, but when we run the query command again, we should see that the session has now been disconnected:

Output:

I hope this helps to get you back in to your terminal sessions!

Enjoy…