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I'm trying to run a batch script on a remote server via powershell. Pretty straight forward:

$password = ConvertTo-SecureString "password" -AsPlainText -Force
$cred= New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential ("domain\user", $password)
$sesh= new-pssession -computername "MSSCA" -credential $cred

invoke-command -session $sesh -scriptblock {
    cmd.exe /C "C:\install.bat"
}

Remove-PSSession $sesh

This seems to randomly fail with the following error error

Image link here

On the remote machine, running the powershell command winrm quickconfig to configure the remote management service informs me that it's already set up to receive requests/remote management.

Only AFTER running this command will invoke-command go through properly. How? I didn't even configure anything. How can I fix this?

tnw
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    Is the remote server very old? This is probably a stretch but it could have still been configured to listen on the old default ports (80/443) instead of the new ones (5985/5986). IIRC they are default as of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. – Anthony Neace Aug 14 '13 at 15:25
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    Please copy & paste the error text. The screenshot is *very* difficult to read, and the text is not searchable so others will not be able to find it in the future. – alroc Aug 14 '13 at 18:49
  • @alroc Right click on image, copy url, new tab, paste. Apologies, I didn't want to have a wall of text. – tnw Aug 14 '13 at 19:25

2 Answers2

4

Check out the help for winrm (btw this is a Windows exe, not a Powershell command):

> winrm help quickconfig
Windows Remote Management Command Line Tool

winrm quickconfig [-quiet] [-transport:VALUE] [-force]

Performs configuration actions to enable this machine for remote management.
Includes:
  1. Start the WinRM service
  2. Set the WinRM service type to auto start
  3. Create a listener to accept request on any IP address
  4. Enable firewall exception for WS-Management traffic (for http only)

Maybe your remote machines have some subset of the 4 steps enabled, but not all of them at once until your run the utility. In particular, the listener config has given me trouble in the past. You can check the listener config before/after using below (run as admin on a remote box):

dir wsman:\localhost\listener

You can also try running Enable-PSRemoting (must run as admin), which will include additional logging.

latkin
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  • That would explain it. Thanks. I suppose I should have looked at documentation. – tnw Aug 14 '13 at 16:17
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I ran into this before and it ended up being the script execution policy. Use the Set-ExecutionPolicy cmdlet on the affected hosts. For testing purposes use this command parameter:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

I strongly recommend you don't leave the setting at Unrestricted, but it's useful for determining possible causes.

For reference:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee176961.aspx

Colyn1337
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