Enable PSRemoting Remotely

So it’s been an interesting week for me at work as we brought a new customer online.  It’s really great to be working with a dynamic team in a rapidly evolving environment.  One of the things that’s keeping us ahead of the game is relying on PowerShell when performing repetitive tasks.  In this week’s article I’m going to talk about a set of functions I had to come up this week to start PSRemoting remotely.

I’d seen a bunch of postings where people used Schtasks.exe and or PSExec to enable PSRemoting but I didn’t like either of those approaches.  I wanted to do it in a more native powershell way.  I got a lot of help from Thomas Lee’s blog where he talked about writing registry keys remotely using powershell.

From there I went on to write a set of functions, 5 total, that will perform all the functions required to enable PSRemoting.  In order to accomplish the configuration for the WinRM service and the windows firewall remotely I had the functions write entries in the policy node of the registry.

So I’ll stop talking and get onto the functions.

All of them can be downloaded here

Set-WinRMListener, works by creating 3 registry keys that configure the WinRM service when it restarts.

Restart-WinRM, Uses Get-WmiObject to start and stop the WinRM service.

Set-WinRMStartup, sets the startup type of the WinRM service to automatic.

Set-WinRMFirewallRule, creates 2 registry keys to configure the firewall exemptions required by PSRemoting.

Restart-WindowsFirewall, restarts the windows firewall service to allow the registry configurations to take hold.

 

Anyway, all the functions are defined in the script on the TechNet gallery.  I hope you guys like the functions and get some use out of them.  Go ahead and leave a comment or email me if you’re interested in further explanation.  Also, feel free to leave comments on the TechNet entry.