How to fix a broken VDS server on Windows

Our contest "Level 80 Admin" has ended . The task of the participants was to fix the “broken” VDS server. Congratulations to our Winners. The main prize goes to Saratov, Mikhail Goch. The winner completed the task in less than 2 hours, an excellent result.
All contestants who do not win prizes will receive a 10% discount on the use of VDS servers from RUVDS for life. You will be sent a personal notification by e-mail specified during registration in the competition.

We post the solution.

So, let's begin!
We are trying to connect to the server in the standard way through the RDP-client. Does not exceed. Perhaps this is one of the ideas of the contest?
We are connected via emergency mode in your account. Connected!

We notice that the admin avatar did not load, therefore, most likely, non-gui mode is used.
Enter your credentials. Before us is a dark screen. Usually in non-gui mode cmd.exe opens immediately, but at the moment the utility is for some reason not launched.
Most likely, the current user does not have permission to run it or the executable file itself is missing.

We send the ctrl + alt + del command by clicking on the button and open the Task manager. We need to somehow run the command line interpreter.
File> New Task ... is just right for this purpose. We try to give the necessary rights to the cmd.exe file, for this we execute the command:
cacls "c: \ windows \ system32 \ cmd.exe" / G Administrator: R (we use cacls, since icacls is not allowed to run under the current user)

Now we try to run cmd.exe through the New task ... It turned out!
Next, we need to install the system components that are necessary to run the operating system in GUI mode. Run
:
cacls "C: \ Windows \ System32 \ WindowsPowerShell \ v1.0 \ powershell.exe" / G Administrator: R

Then run powershell and run the command:
Add-WindowsFeature Server-Gui-Shell, Server-Gui-Mgmt-Infra

Wait installation is complete, reboot. Now we are in the usual GUI mode, it’s so much more convenient!
We notice that the rule that allows incoming connections to port 3389 is disabled. That's what prevented us from connecting to our server via RDP. We turn on and connect via RDP.
Install IIS Manager and open it.

We go into the Application Pools section and see that the ruvds contest pool is disabled. Turn on ...
Next, go to the root directory of the site and open the web.config file.

It contains the following:

We conclude that we should get rid of this file as soon as possible.
We delete ... Everything

seems to be ready ... We are trying to open the address YOUR_VPS_IP . Unable to establish a connection. It seems that you need to look into the settings of the firewall.
We find the World Wide Web Services (HTTP Traffic-In) rule and notice that for the public profile this rule does not work.
We activate the rule.

We try to load the page - the download has started, but it is very slow ... Maybe you should look into the site settings.
Go to the Limits settings for our site.
We notice a check mark next to Limit bandwidth usage and a value of 1024. With these settings, fast page loading is not possible. We remove ...

We try to load the page ...


You are the owner of a free VPS for a year!

The list of winners, since we did not ask for names, we indicate only the initial characters of the e-mail:

1. place: mgot
2. place: a.svyat
3. place: nightw
4. place: wolf_k

Hope this was fun. See you soon!
Write in the comments that you didn’t like or liked what you would like to change next time. Thanks.