How to Remotely Disable a RAS Port

This article was previously published under Q147717

You may need to remove a RAS port from service due to a problem such as physical port or modem failure. Disabling the port prevents RAS clients from dialing in to a bad port and suffering disconnections or lockups. However, you may not have physical access to the server to be able to do this interactively. To disable a RAS port remotely:

1. From a remote computer, log into the RAS server with administrative privilege.
2. Connect to the C$ share on the RAS server.
3. Go into the %System Root%\SYSTEM32\RAS directory.
4. Backup the SERIAL.INI file as SERIAL.OLD. Edit the SERIAL.INI file as follows:
5. Locate the entry in the SERIAL.INI file that references the port to be disabled. For example: [COM1] or [COM2] and remove the entire section.
6. From Server Manager, stop and restart the RAS service.