Sunday, January 18, 2015

Remote desktop connection: Authentication error has occurred (Code: 0x80004005)

Usually i connect to my other machine without any problems, one time suddenly i was receiving this error:

Authentication error has occurred (Code: 0x80004005)

And here is my experience with it, searching for it found this post saying that it could because of third party software or antivirus. Then i remembered that sometimes when i had fiddler open on my machine, i get authentication errors from outlook and some other clients that are unable to connect with the server on secure connections, i figured out that this could be the reason, that i have fiddler open in my machine and it is blocking the authentication.

So i needed to shut down fiddler on my remote machine, i remember that PsTools allows executing commands on remote machine, Then i found this article on steps to run PsKill to kill process on remote machine.

All i needed to do is:
- Download PsTools, then extract it
- Start command prompt in elevated mode (run as administrator)
- Go to PsTools extracted folder on run the command

pskill.exe \\MachineName -u username -p password Fiddler

Should take some time and come back with

Process Fiddler killed on MachineName

Trying to remote connect to my machine after that, worked as usual.