Even though Windows is extremely GUI friendly, I find that if you really want to do some fine tune high end geeky things on your Windows computer, you pretty much need to do it from a command line.

For those of you who know the power of the command line, you also know that it is really useful to be able to run some of these command line tools remotely. There are a number of different ways to do this. I would like to share with you a couple of my favorites.

PsExec

If you are not familiar with PsExec, then this is going to be a bit of a revelation for you. PsExec is a freeware program that allows you to execute a command on a remote machine. If that command is a command line program, it will send the output of that command back to you.

The real trick comes when you run the command console. Try this command:

psexec \\RemoteComputer cmd.exe

where \\RemoteComputer is the name or IP address of the remote computer (Make sure you use the \\ otherwise the command will fail.)

What this does is connect to the remote computer and then open a command prompt on the remote machine. You can then work with this new command prompt and it will execute all of your actions on the remote system!

In order for this to work for you, you need to have the admin$ share active on the remote computer (which it is by default) and you need to have account information with administrative access to the system.  This is mainly used in situations where you have a Windows network and you are the administrator of the network.

SSH on Windows

If you have the time to set up something a bit more elaborate, I would recommend using SSH on your computer.  If you set it up properly, you can have remote command access to your computer just by having access to one port.  This will then establish an encrypted command line session to the computer.



The other nice part of this is that you can get secure remote access to the computer running SSH from any computer on the Internet by simply forwarding one port on your external firewall to your internal system and pointing your SSH client to your firewall’s external IP address.

If you need a free SSH server for Windows, I would suggest freeSSHd.  As for an SSH client, you can’t go wrong with PuTTY.