an idea - psexec for UNIX systems

[Paul Jansen]

I regularly use psexec (from www.sysinternals.com) to
administer NT/2K machines.  It's really useful in that
you don't need to set up any service or server process
on the destination machine that you wish to run the
process on.
I'm not sure whether samba and it's supporting
utilities possess all the components required to
implement a clone of this utility under UNIX.  I was
wondering whetehr anyone would care to comment.

I usually use the following command to set up a remote
command prompt on the remote machine:

psexec \\remotemachine cmd

There are options to specify the user account to
connect as (including domain) and you can be prompted
for a password.

I believe how the utility works is to connect to the
registry of the remote nachine (once you've
authenticated) and dynamically install a service.  It
then somhow kicks of the requested program on the
remote machine (ie: cmd.exe) and modifies standard
input and output so that it goes through the newly
created service.  On a cleanly exited session the
dynamically installed service is torn down and
removed.  Even if the session ends abruptly and the
service remains it can be removed by re-connecting and
exiting cleanly.  The program is freeware but I could
not see the source at the site.  I noticed that they
have just written their first Linux utility so they
probably wouldn't be opposed to this idea.
I think this has tremendous potential.  What do people
think?

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/psexec.shtml

Regards,
Paul


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