In part2 of this series on PowerShell remoting we quickly looked at various cmdlets that form part of overall remoting infrastructure. The list there included cmdlets related to PS Session configuration. Now that we have gone through the basics of remoting, it is time for us to dig in to these additional cmdlets and explore what they really do.

So, in this part, we will look at all the PS session configurtion cmdlets, discuss how to create custom PS Session configurations and the need for it. Let us dive in to this now.

If you have been following this remoting series and using PS remoting on a test setup or even production, you must have gone through a few initial hiccups. In fact, there could be many such issues if you are working in a mixed environment where you have a few computers in a domain and a few in workgroup. So, in this part of the remoting series I will discuss some of these issues and workarounds to resolve the same. I discussed enabling remoting on workgroup computers in part3 – “Enable remoting” of this series. This post is kind of an extension to that.

In part 6 of the remoting series we looked at how we can use Import-PSSession cmdlet to execute remote commands as if they were local. This is nice but this will last only while the session ($s in the example) is alive. The moment we kill the session — using Rem0ve-PSSession, remoting session will also get killed. In this part of the series, we will look at how we can save a remoting session to disk so that we don’t even have to explicitly create a session.

In this part of the remoting series, we will look at a feature called implicit remoting which makes it possible to run the commands / scripts on the remote computer while in the local session.

In this part of the remoting series, I will talk about using Enter-PSSession and Exit-PSSession cmdlets to perform interactive remoting.

Why do you need interactive remoting?

To understand the advantages of interactive remoting in PowerShell 2.0, let us first look at some gotchas with Invoke-Command. Take an example of a remote system where SharePoint 2010 is installed. SharePoint 2010 provides native PowerShell cmdlets and these cmdlets can be accesses only if you load Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell PS snap-in. So, to do this using Invoke-Command

In this part of PowerShell remoting series, I will discuss how to run commands or scripts on remote computer(s). Within remoting, there are couple of ways to run commands or scripts on a remote machine. This includes Invoke-Command cmdlet and interactive remoting sessions. These two methods deserve a separate post for each and hence I will discuss the Invoke-Command method in today’s post.

Once you have enabled remoting on all your computers, you can use Invoke-Command cmdlet to run commands and scripts on local computer or on remote computer(s). There are many possible variations of this cmdlet. I will cover most of them here.

In this part of the series of articles on PowerShell 2.0 remoting, we will look at how to enable remoting in different scenarios. This post assumes that you are running a supported operating system and you have installed all necesary pre-requisite software.

So, how do you enable remoting?

Remoting in PowerShell 2.0 can be enabled by just running the following cmdlet

Enable-PSRemoting

Note: You have to run this at a elevated PowerShell prompt. Also, all your active networks should be set to “Home” or “Work” network location. Setting firewall exceptions for remoting will fail if the network location is set to “Public”.