Have you ever needed to inspect or configure a server and didn’t want to go through the hassle of remoting into the server? Me too. Well as I take a deeper dive into the bowels of PowerShell 4 I found a cmdlet that allows me to issue PowerShell commands on my local machine and have them run on the remote server. I know your excited, I couldn’t contain myself either. You will need PowerShell 4 and a Windows 2012 server that you have login rights to control. I am going to give you the commands to get you started and then you can Bing the rest, but its pretty simple. Once you established the connection, you just issue PowerShell commands just as if you were running them locally. Basically, you can configure your remote server from your local machine. You don’t even need to activate the GUI on the server. You can just drive it all from PowerShell and save the resources needed with the GUI.

Security

Is it secure? About as secure as you remoting into the server through a GUI. Yet, there is a difference in the vulnerabilities that you have to deal with. Security will always be an issue. This is something I will have to research more, but I do know that you can encrypt the traffic and keep the messages deep inside your DMZ.

Code

Note: Anything before the > is part of the command prompt.

PS C:\> Enter-PSSession -ComputerName server01

[server01]: PS C:\Users\CharlesBryant\Documents>

This starts the session. Notice that the command prompt now has the server name in braces and I am in my documents folder on the server.

[server01]: PS C:\Users\CharlesBryant\Documents> hostname

server01

Here I issue the host name command to make sure I’m not dreaming and I am actually on the server. Yup, this is really happening.

[server01]: PS C:\Users\CharlesBryant\Documents> Get-EventLog -list | Where-Object {$_.logdisplay name -eq "Application"}

Max(K) Retain OverflowAction Entries Log

------ ------ -------------- ------- ---

4,096 0 OverwriteAsNeeded 3,092 Application

Yes…I just queried the event log on a remote server without having to go through the remote desktop dance. BooYah! To end your session is even easier.

[server01]: PS C:\Users\CharlesBryant\Documents> Exit

Enjoy.