Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials –You do not have permission to open the dashboard.

A question came up in the Essentials Forum recently which prompted me to build quite a large lab, and not even manage to repro the issue. The issue affects both the Essentials Role and the SKU., but it does not appear to affect R1.

The symptoms were, that a user of the Domain Admins was unable to open the Dashboard, being greeted instead with this error..

You do not have permission to open the dashboard

Having checked the relevant group memberships and that sort of thing, we were all a little puzzled.

The solution it turns out, is very simple. It is based on the users Primary Group Membership. If the Primary Group of your administrator is set to ‘Domain Admins’ then the dashboard will fail to open with the error above.

You can see this noted in the Dashboard log file. (c:\programdata\microsoft\windows server\logs)

Dashboard Log

It is a curious error, and i’m interested to know how common it is to have changed the primary group of an administrator account.

However simply changing it back to the default ‘Domain Users’ is enough to solve the problem.

User Group Membership

Simply click on ‘Domain Users’ and then click the ‘Set Primary Group’ button.

User Group Membership Change Primary Group

Thanks to rowebil for posting the solution.

About Robert Pearman
Robert Pearman is a UK based Small Business Server enthusiast. He has been working within the SMB IT Industry for what feels like forever. Robert likes Piña colada and taking walks in the rain, on occasion he also enjoys writing about Small Business Technology like Windows Server Essentials or more recently writing PowerShell Scripts. If you're in trouble, and you can find him, maybe you can ask him a question.

5 Responses to Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials –You do not have permission to open the dashboard.

  1. Hanni says:

    it’s not that simple – sometimes it takes a reset for the user to realize that they had lost permissions, then no matter what user you end up using to try and fix this issue – you end up having no access to any admin rights (and yes that includes local admin)
    i had done 5 formats, and last one is a backup restore.
    there is no solution to this and it makes no sense. it’s very unfortunate that something so simple and stupid exists in such a great product from microsoft.

  2. I do not see anyone on that thread with an unresolved issue, or anything about a ‘reset’. I am not sure what your issues is currently. Can I suggest you open a thread on the forum which will provide better visibility and assistance.

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