Is there a way to determine who is logged on to a particular (remote) machine given the IP address (or the workstation name) of the machine?
The machines in question are on an Active Directory Domain
The user running the script probably won't have any special rights on either their local or the remote machine
Operating system is Windows XP
Any programming language is fine but ideally
VBScript (yeah I know)
C#
Java
DOS Batch file
PSloggedon from SysInternals will provide this from a batch file, however the user would require admin access on the remote machine. I doubt you can get this information without Administrator access.
Difficult to do depending on the permissioning on the machine. One way is to query WMI on the remote machine and check the owner of the explorer.exe process.
You don't need admin access. Just use net apis.
ask on news://194.177.96.26/comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.win32
where it's a FAQ
Related
Using PSEXEC and to run a VBS as LocalSystem account, to let the script run with admin rights.
VB script called prompts and GUIs are not visible if a person is connected to the computer via RDP.
You can see the script or GUI as a running process in task manager, but it is not visible.
Windows Security setting preventing this? Limitation of RDP?
Your script is running in an invisible desktop so you cannot run a denial of service attack on the interactive user of the physical computer.
This is normal.
State what your goal is rather than why your solution to an unknown problem doesn't work.
It doesn't matter your intentions.
This question is better suited to https://serverfault.com as you are trying to administer a network by programming rather than how it's designed to be administered.
Normally one uses logon scripts or group policy to set the RunOnce key.
Our team has ~80 Windows development machines, and activities of each developer are logged as text files on the local storage of those machines.
To analyze the logged activities, I want to gather all log files from those machines. Additionally, the log files are updated constantly, so It is desirable to gather files with the command-line from my machine.
I’ve searched and found some solutions, but all of those are not suitable for our situation:
We cannot use PsExec, because tcp/135 and tcp/445 are both closed (countermeasure for WannaCry).
Administrative share is disabled.
telnet service is not up and is banned by security reasons.
WinRM is disabled on those machines by default.
It is difficult to install new software like OpenSSH on those machines (because of the rule of this project)
RDP is the only way to connect those machines. (I have an account on all machines)
How can I copy files from remote Windows machines with command-line through RDP?
Or, at least, is there any way to execute a command on remote Windows machines with command-line through RDP?
I think you can do this, though it is very hacky :)
For a basic setup, which just copies files once, what you would need to do is
Run a script in the remote session when it logs in. I can think of three ways to do this:
Use the "Alternate Shell" RDP file property. This runs a specified program in place of explorer.exe on login; you can use it to run "cmd.exe /c [your script]" for instance.
If that doesn't work (e.g. the remote machine doesn't respect it), you might be able to use a scheduled task that runs the script on login, but perhaps only for a specified user, or maybe the script could check the WinStation type to make sure this is actually an RDP connection before doing anything.
It's also possible to do this by connecting in RemoteApp mode and using the script as your "application", but that only works for Server and Enterprise editions of Windows.
Enable either drive redirection or clipboard redirection on the RDP connection, to give you a way to get data out.
Drive redirection is much simpler to script; you just have the remote script copy files to e.g. "\\tsclient\C\logs".
Clipboard redirection is theoretically possible - you have the remote script copy, then a local script paste - but would probably be a pain to get working in practice. I'm only mentioning it in case drive redirection isn't available for some reason.
You would probably want to script to then log the session off afterward.
You could then launch that from command-line by running "mstsc.exe [your RDP file]". The RDP files could be programmatically generated if needed (given you're working with 80 machines).
If you want a persistent connection you can execute commands over, that's more complicated, but still technically possible. Two ways I can think of:
Use the previous method to run a program on logon, but this time create a custom application that receives commands using a transport that isn't blocked and executes them in the session. I've done this with WCF over HTTP, for instance; it's not secure, of course.
Develop and install a service on the remote machine that opens an RDP virtual channel, and a corresponding RDP client plugin that communicates with it. You can then do whatever you want across the connection. While this solution would be the most likely to work, it's also the most heavyweight and time-consuming to implement so it's probably a last resort.
I have a puzzling situation with the Inno Setup FileExists function.
Here's the situation. I have three networked computers with like WORKGROUP names.
1) Windows 7 32-bit
2) Windows 7 64-bit
3) Window XP Service Pack 3
1) and 3) have been setup as servers with read-write shares, ex. ShareExe and ShareData
The problematic Inno Setup creates shortcuts to the executable in the ShareExe folder. It asks the user for the ComputerName of the server and then uses FileExists to verify correct input.
Running this setup on the XP (3) machine and specifying 1)'s computername works just fine, however when running the setup on the Win7 64-bit PC and specifying the same ComputerName as with XP, causes the FileExtsts test to fail.
Strangely, I can go to Network Places and open the ShareExe folder and successfully run the executable. My question is, "why does Inno FileExists fail only on the Win 7 64-bit machine?" I cannot find anything in the reference materials that suggest any version differences with FileExists. (I also tried FileSearch with the same results).
TIA
In Windows 7 (and Vista) with UAC enabled, by default network credentials and drive mappings are not shared between admin and non-admin contexts, even for the same user.
By default, Inno elevates to admin permissions (via PrivilegesRequired=admin), since most installations must (and should) be performed per-machine by an admin user. However this means that any credentials prompted for or saved by Explorer when browsing for the desktop are not available to it.
When files are accessed directly by APIs (as with FileExists), Windows will typically try to silently connect to the server using the same username/password as was used to log into the PC; if this fails then it just reports an error since it has no way to prompt for alternate credentials at that point. So if you can ensure that the login details on both PCs are the same, then it should work. (You usually get this for free on computers connected to a domain, but not a workgroup.)
If that isn't possible, then something else you could try would be to force the access via a shell dialog -- if the FileExists fails, then use GetOpenFileName to prompt the user to find a specific file in that folder, using the same initial path. I haven't tested this, but I think this should result in Windows displaying a credential prompt and then you should be ok after that.
(If this is for an internal app, then another option is to disable the separation of credentials [via a security policy setting] or UAC entirely, though the latter isn't really a good idea. Of course this isn't tolerable for a general-release app, and it's cleaner if you solve it one of the other ways anyway.)
Im working on a linux server at work and I wanted to find out how to set certain permissions to Windows users connected to that server.
Im trying to assign permissions to windows machines connected to the linux server?
This is how the network is setup... There are different computers that are connected in a network, that connects to a dedicated lunix (debian) server. On the server there is a shared folder that all of the computers can access.
What I would like to do is set a read & execute permission to a certain computers in that Windows network. Is there a way to set certain permission to a specific computer by its Computer Name (Full computer name, ex. Garys-pc) and Workgroup Name through the linux system to set certain permissions?
How can I do this? Im a novice with the linux operating system so I would appreciate any help with this. Any advice will be appreciated.
The smb.conf(5) man page, VARIABLE SUBSTITUTIONS section, details all variables that can be used in the configuration file. These variables can be used in an include directive in order to include other files that can modify global behavior.
I've been trying to get psexec to run executables on remote machines from custom build tasks in visual studio. All of these commands work from the command line but running it from an application seems to be a problem. Some commands work, on other psexec hangs and consequently so do msbuild and visual studio 2005. I'm calling SharePoint's stsadm.exe in this case, but this problem occurs with a lot of programs, when running psexec from an application. There are lots of people having this problem, but there seems to be no solution, so my question is: Does anyone know a working alternative to psexec?
I've experienced 'hangs' when executing PSEXEC against a remote system, but I always attributed it to the security context in which the remote process was running under.
From PSEXEC help:
If you omit a username the remote
process runs in the same account from
which you execute PsExec, but because
the remote process is impersonating it
will not have access to network
resources on the remote system. When
you specify a username the remote
process executes in the account
specified, and will have access to any
network resources the account has
access to. Note that the password is
transmitted in clear text to the
remote system.
If your executing a process remotely, that then needs to access the database (stsadm.exe), then it could be failing trying to access the network resource, depending on how PSEXEC was executed. If thats the case, I'd imagine it would eventually time out and give some sort of resource unavailable message.
There are two things that generally done when executing deployment steps against a remote machine to prevent the behavior your describing:
Like rifferte mentioned, make sure all assets needed to
deploy are local to the remote
machine (copy files, etc) before
using PSEXEC to execute the script (*.bat, *.vbs, *.ps, etc) -
so that everything runs 'local' to
the remote machine.
Run PSEXEC using
a domain username/password when
executing it - note that this
information is passed in clear text
to the remote server.
There's always RCE.
RemCom is a small (10KB upx packed)
remoteshell / telnet replacement that
lets you execute processes on remote
windows systems, copy files on remote
systems, process there output and
stream it back. It allows execution of
remote shell commands directly with
full interactive console without
having to install any client software.
On local machines it is also able to
impersonate so can be used as a silent
replacement for Runas command.
You can try to have psexec call a bat program that executes what you need on the remote machine. I ran into this issue with installutil.exe. A simple bat file on the remote machine resolved it.
You should also share your experience on the sysinternals board. There may be something they can do in a future revision.