How to use PSTools
PSTools are available from Microsoft. PsExec’s is a powerful tool for sending interactive commands on command-prompts on remote systems and remote-enabling tools like IpConfig that otherwise do not have the ability to show information about remote systems.
Setting up PSTools/PSexec
- Download PSTools/PSexec from Microsoft. (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896649.aspx Current link from Microsoft as of article publish.)
- Extract to a folder.
- Open cmd prompt and change to that folder with the psexec executable.
- Run psexec -accepteula -i -s \\computername -u username cmd -accepteula
Most Common commands would to be to restart/Shutdown a remote machine. Following is the Syntax:
Shutdown : psshutdown -u username -p password \\remotecomputer
Reboot: PsShutdown.exe -r -u username -p password \\RemoteComputerName
If you want to schedule the shutdown at a specific time you can use -t switch to specify the time in 24 hours format. For example, to schedule remote computer shutdown at 3:30 pm today, the command would be:
PsShutdown.exe -t 15:30 -u username -p password \\Remotecomputer
Services restart: But before you can connect to a remote system using PsService, you need to make sure ports 445 and 139 are open on the remote computer. This means, if the computer is running a firewall, or a firewall exists between your computer and the remote computer, those ports need to be open.
Note: find our services for each application once you want to reboot it.
psservice.exe \\rcomputer -u mike -p 123456 start spooler
Where:\\rcomputer – is the name of the remote computer.
-u mike -p 123456 – is the username and password of the account that has administration rights on the remote computer.
start spooler – is the command to start the service named spooler.
List of Tools which you can use from downloadable Zip file which contains all these tools.
- PsExec – execute processes remotely
- PsFile – shows files opened remotely
- PsGetSid – display the SID of a computer or a user
- PsInfo – list information about a system
- PsPing – measure network performance
- PsKill – kill processes by name or process ID
- PsList – list detailed information about processes
- PsLoggedOn – see who’s logged on locally and via resource sharing (full source is included)
- PsLogList – dump event log records
- PsPasswd – changes account passwords
- PsService – view and control services
- PsShutdown – shuts down and optionally reboots a computer
- PsSuspend – suspends processes
- PsUptime – shows you how long a system has been running since its last reboot (PsUptime’s functionality has been incorporated into PsInfo)
Author of PSTools have other interesting tools which can be explored at : https://live.sysinternals.com/