Geek School: Learning Windows 7 - Remote Administration

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WinRM

It's important to acknowledge that while WinRM serves as a capable management solution, it has largely been surpassed by the more advanced capabilities of PowerShell Remoting.

Windows Remote Management is a protocol designed for command-line based system administration. A key advantage of WinRM lies in its foundation on the widely accepted HTTP protocol. This allows it to traverse many corporate firewalls without requiring the opening of specific ports. WinRM isn’t activated by default on Windows 7, necessitating manual enablement on target workstations and servers.

To activate WinRM, launch an elevated command prompt and execute the following command:

winrm quickconfig

Enabling WinRM results in several system modifications:

• The Windows Remote Management service is configured to start automatically with a delay.
• HTTP listeners are established on all locally assigned IP addresses.
• A firewall exception is automatically created to allow WinRM traffic.

These steps complete the basic setup for utilizing WinRM on your computer.

Establishing a Connection to a WinRM-Enabled Computer

Before connecting to a computer via WinRM, you must first add it to your list of trusted hosts. This is achieved using the following command:

Please remember to replace the IP address in the command below with the actual IP address of the machine you intend to connect to.

winrm set winrm/config/client @{TrustedHosts=”192.168.174.130”}

After adding the machine to your TrustedHosts list, you can initiate a connection and execute commands remotely. This is accomplished through the Windows Remote Shell (WinRS) command.

winrs –r:192.168.174.130 –u:Taylor –p:Pa$$w0rd netstat

Ensure you substitute the following values:

• 192.168.174.130 should be replaced with the IP address of the WinRM-enabled machine.
• Taylor represents the username of a local administrator account on the remote machine.
• Pa$$w0rd is the password associated with the specified user account.
• netstat is the command you wish to execute on the remote system. For instance, to view listening ports, utilize the 'netstat' command.

These adjustments allow for remote command execution via WinRM.

PowerShell Remoting

As previously noted, PowerShell’s Remoting functionality leverages WinRM as its foundation. Let's clarify the distinctions between this feature and older shell technologies.

Object Orientation is a core element of PowerShell’s capabilities.

A key aspect of PowerShell’s strength lies in its Object Orientation. This programming paradigm, often abbreviated as OOP, promotes code reusability. It achieves this through the creation of complex data structures built from basic types like numbers and strings, as well as other structures. These complex structures are known as objects.

Essentially, an object is a digital representation of an entity. Objects possess properties that define their characteristics, and methods that dictate their actions. Consider, for instance, an object named Person. This Person object might include:

• A property indicating the person’s eye color.
• A property specifying the person’s hair color.
• A method called sleep, representing the action of sleeping.
• A method called walk, representing the action of walking.

OOP encompasses much more than this, but this definition will suffice for our purposes. Because everything within PowerShell is treated as an object, data manipulation becomes significantly easier. For example, the Get-Service cmdlet retrieves information about services running on the local system. To determine the type of object it returns, simply pipe its output to Get-Member:

Get-Service | Get-Member

The output reveals a type of object called a ServiceController. You can also observe the Methods and Properties supported by these ServiceController objects. With this information, it becomes clear that a service can be stopped by invoking the Kill method on the object representing that service.

Remote Execution

Having configured WinRM, our Windows 7 machine is now equipped for remote control via PowerShell. The Invoke-Command cmdlet is used to execute PowerShell cmdlets on a remote machine:

Invoke-Command WIN-H7INVSHKC7T {get-service}

This completes the process.

Should you have any inquiries, feel free to reach out on Twitter @taybgibb, or simply post a comment.