Using Technet Psexec

If you are in need of performing a task on a remote computer and you don’t want to start up a RDP session to do so (say you want to run ipconfig /all) you can use the psexec tool from Technet to do this and anything else you can dream up.  You can download Psexec from here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553

Once you have it downloaded (please note that the file you download contains numerous tools and psexec is just one of them) and unzipped you are going to want to copy the executable into a folder that is in your executable path (say c:\windows).

To give you an example of how to use this tool start up a command prompt and type in “psexec \\remoteworkstationname -u “username” -p “userpassword” ipconfig /all” and see what you get. Some things to remember here is that if you are using a domain level account you need to include the domain name then “\” then the user name. It is also a good idea to enclose your user name and password in double quotes.

As you can see from the example the things that you can do are pretty much anything you can do from the command line of the computer as if you are sitting at it. So here are some other examples:

• gpupdate /force
• gpresult /r
• cmd
• regedit

And the list goes on and on. If you really want to get creative you can run installers. A recent article in Windows IT Pro gave an example of installing Security Essentials using this command: “psexec \\remoteworkstationname -S \\servername\softwaresharename mssefullinstall-XP-x86\setup.exe /S /runwgacheck /o”

Some additional features worth mentioning are the ability to run the command on all computers that are listed in a specific file or a really dangerous one \\* which will run on all computers in the domain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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