Skip to main content

Enabling PowerShell Remoting and Remote Administration - Windows 2008 R2 Server Core

Enabling Powershell Remoting and Remote Administration - Windows 2008 R2 Server Core

Following on from my post Enable WinRM via Group Policy, there as some follow on tasks to ensure server core is manageable via powershell and server manager.

Add Firewall Rule
To start with, to allow GUI remote management of the event viewer, another firewall rule needs to be added :

Computer Configuration / Policies / Windows Settings / Security Settings / Windows Firewall with Advanced Security

Create an Inbound Rule allowing the predefined group 'Remote Event Log Management'

Install powershell and packs
Next, as server core is the only version of Windows Server 2008 R2 that does not install Powershell V2 by default, we need to install powershell and which ever cmdlet management pack we need. In this case I am only going to install the server manager and AD cmdlets.
Winrs -r:$dc.name Ocsetup MicrosoftWindowsPowerShell
Winrs -r:$dc.name Ocsetup ServerManager-PSH-Cmdlets
Winrs -r:$dc.name Ocsetup ActiveDirectory-PowerShell

Restart services
To complete the task, we need to stop and start the WinRM service to register the services now available. As we will be stopping the Winrm Service, we can use it to stop the service, but not to start it again. To get around this, I have used WMI to connect to the remote server.

$service = gwmi -Class Win32_Service -ComputerName $DC.name | where {$_.name -eq "winrm"}
stop service"
$service.StopService()
#let the service stop before trying to start in again
Start-sleep 2
"start service"
$service.StartService()

Finally, I have read in from a csv list of servers to process. Actually I ran a remote job with the script from this post and output the servers that failed and exported to csv:

$job.childjobs | where {$_.State -eq "Failed"} | Select location | Export-Csv dclist.csv -NoTypeInformation

The complete script

Foreach ($DC in $(Import-csv dclist.csv)){
   Winrs -r:$dc.location Ocsetup MicrosoftWindowsPowerShell
   Winrs -r:$dc.location Ocsetup ServerManager-PSH-Cmdlets
   Winrs -r:$dc.location Ocsetup ActiveDirectory-PowerShell
   $service = gwmi -Class Win32_Service -ComputerName $DC.location | where {$_.name -eq "winrm"}
   "stop service"
   $service.StopService()
   #let the service stop before trying to start in again
   Start-sleep 2
   "start service"
   $return = $service.StartService()
   #check the service has started, if not try again
   if ($return.returnvalue -ne 0){$service.StartService()}
}

After setting the GPO to enable winrm, adding the firewall rules to manage event logs remotely, ensuring the PowerShell componenets are installed and the service have been restarted, your server core installs should be easily managed remotely.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Enable Powershell Remoting (WinRM) via Group Policy

I have been doing some testing on enabling WinRM via group policy, being that WinRM is the service that Powershell v2 sets up it remoting capabilities. Here are the GPO settings that you need to configure WinRM .... set the winrm service to auto start Computer Configuration \ Policies \ Windows Settings \ Security Settings \ System Services Windows Remote Management (WS-Management)  set Startup Mode to Automatic start the service incorporated in to the above - you may need a restart. create a winrm listener Computer Configuration / Policies / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Windows Remote Management (WinRM) / WinRM Service / Allow automatic configuration of listeners IPv4 filter: * * is listen on all addresses, or if you only want a particular IP address to respond use an iprange eg 10.1.1.1-10.1.1.254 - don't forget that this IP range has to be valid for all hosts that fall in the scope of the GPO you are creating.  You can use 1...
2 comments
Read more

Assigning Permissions - AGDLP

AGDLP It seems I have been mildly distracted away from the title of this blog site.   It does say AD Admin, but I seem to have been taken away by file system stuff.   I have to say, it has all been worthwhile, but it’s probably time I got back to the real heart of what I do. There are probably a million permission assigning advice pages, but I thought I would put another one out there after referring to AGDLP in my last post. So, what is this all about – AGDLP.   Well, it is something I learned in my MCSE 2003 studies and has become ingrained into my ideals since.   As a contractor, I get to move job often.   This enables me to forge opinions on how to configure things in a domain, and more importantly how NOT to configure things. AGDLP is definitely on the to do list…for anyone in any size domain or forest, as it follows some very basic principals.   I will explain these whilst I go through what AGDPL stands for. A A is for...
2 comments
Read more

Finding out what 'SearchFlags' are set on you AD attributes

Whilst doing some research into indexed attributes, I posted this  a while back on how to find your index attributes.  Since then, I have looked a little deeper into what indexing really means and found this excellent explanation on the numbers that can be found in the searchflags attribute of a schema object. Using Florian’s reference, I built the following script (which is both powershell v1 and v2 compatible) to get the schema attributes from the forest schema and return (among other things) the breakdown of your attributes search flags. $forest = [System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory.forest]::getcurrentforest() $schema = [ADSI]('LDAP://CN=Schema,CN=Configuration,dc=' + ($($forest).name -replace "[.]",",dc=")) $attributes = $schema.psbase.children | where {$_.objectClass -eq "attributeSchema"} $collection = @() foreach ($attr in $attributes){ $store = "" | select "Name","lDAPDisplayName","singlev...
2 comments
Read more