Terminal Server - did something change?

  • 11 December 2014
  • 5 replies
  • 39 views

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Until today (at least I didn't notice it until today) when I logged into a terminal server as an administrator, I saw that wrsa.exe was running under the SYSTEM process as well as an instance for each user. Now I am only seeing the SYSTEM session as well as just another single instance for my user. Did something change? I have a few clients that track everything and want to know why it's not showing up anymore and are concerned that it's no longer protecting them.

5 replies

Userlevel 7
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No worries, glad you brought up the issue, as I get to learn something new 🙂  Let me know what support says.
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Excellent!  Thank you very much.  Sorry that I made this difficult.  
Userlevel 7
Badge +56
So there should be an active process for every currently logged in user; if that isn't the case then go ahead and contact our support so we can delve into it.
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I've seen it stated elsewhere that you guys use Terminal Services.  If one of your admin folks logs in and opens task manager, do they see a wrsa.exe process running for each *logged in* user?  Should they?  That's what we've always seen and when the user logs off, the process would go away.  I don't recall having it hang more than once or twice since June.  I just want to know what the expected behaviour should be so I can tell my clients with **bleep** admins the correct answer.
Userlevel 7
Badge +56
One of our escalation folks just happened to be visiting my desk so I asked him about this.  Apparently we have an issue where wrse.exe will hang sessions, which is why you used to see an instance for each user.  Either due to a recent reboot of the server, or a recent update from us that restarted the process, those are all cleared out and you're only seeing the user session for whoever is logged in now.  It's possible that the recent update has changed the hanging behavior, although we're not sure what would have done that, so we're still investigating.  If you could keep an eye on it and let me know if the multiple sessions start showing up when more people have logged in, then I can pass that along to the engineering teams.

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