Remote Administration of Windows XP through the Command Line

Question

Does anyone know of a good way to do remote administration of a Windows XP machine using just the command line?

At the moment the only things it needs to do is to be able to install applications/patches, and transfer files to and from the machine, and installing registry patches would be nice as well.

Currently we use a horrible hacked together solution that uses NetMeeting, in the past I've thrown together a proof of concept using SSH for windows (at the time windows 2000) but it didn't work to my satisfaction and was pretty buggy. Which was probably the result of the SSH Daemon I was running more then anything.

I'm pretty much open to anything, however a solution using SSH would be ideal since it's already approved for installation in my organization, and it's free. I work in the Canadian Government so anything free is best, and anything that we've already got approved for installation is even better.

Answer 1

psexec will allow you to run commands remotely. Some of the other PsTools can help you kill applications, get a list of processes, etc.

Answer 2

The Software Testing Automation Framework (STAF) is designed for remote access, installing software, transferring files. etc. It's open source and you can write your own service if there isn't one that does what you need. It also has a GUI component for writing, scheduling, queueing and monitoring jobs across a pool of machines.

Answer 3

Why must it be

remote administration of a Windows XP machine using just the command line?

I think your very limiting yourself to what is possible by sticking to the command line. In windows environments you can easily use Group Policy to distribute most software and/or patches, and for the ones that you can't you can usually script these changes through any of the popular scripting languages such as JScript, VBScript, Kixtart, AutoIt, Powershell, etc. With these scripting languages you can easily leverage WMI to exceute and mointor processes on remotes systems, copy files, updates registry...basically everything that you're trying to accomplish....and it won't cost you anything but the cost of learning these technologies, and there many online resources and which document how to do them. Here is a link to the Microsoft Script Center, its a great start: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/default.mspx

Answer 4

I wrote this a while back, and used it to maintain my home windows XP desktop for a while: ssh and telnet on windows

I used the SSH option (not telnet). It worked for my purposes (killing remote tasks, copying files etc.) It uses Cygwin, but you're able to run regular windows commands as well as the bash commands that come with cygwin.