Recently I was faced with a problem at one of our clients' Remote Desktop Licensing Services not starting up in services.msc.
The error received when trying to start up the service through the Services snap in, was not efficient in trouble shooting the issue.
To troubleshoot this issue effectively, please take the following steps:
- Open Server Manager
- Expand Roles and click on Remote Desktop Services.
- You should see an error in the events of this role.
Go through the errors and see if you spot the following error:
The Remote Desktop Licensing service cannot start. The following error occurred: Can't initialize Cryptographic - error code 5.
After going through numerous articles on how to solve this to no avail, I decided to look deeper into the issue.
This issue is being caused by the RSA cryptographic files loosing their permissions, thus locking out the licensing manager and disabling it naturally.
To solve this issue, open up Run on your server and insert the following path:
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys
Please verify if all permissions on these files are set correctly. On Server 2008, you should see a little "lock" symbol over the files if the permissions are set incorrectly. Please ensure the following permissions are set:
System: Full Control
Administrator: Full Control
Domain Admins: Full Control
Network Service: Full Control
After these permissions have been set successfully, try and start the RD Licensing Service now, which should solve your problem.
If you are still having issues, go one folder back up and verify that the other folder as well has the correct permissions.
I hope that this has been informative to you as I spent quite some time on this one and hope to save you some time.
Yours Truly,
Sakkie
Dare to Dream.
