PsTools doesn't suck

Ever get all comfortable and situated on your living room couch or recliner with your trusty laptop and suddenly realize that you need to make some changes to your (windows *cough*)desktop computer way on the other end of the house? Chances are that most of us have had this problem, but where others have failed - you will succeed. I will give you the necessary tools to prevent such situations from ruining your laziness. Most of you that have this problem probably have already installed some type of remote access service on your desktop(vnc,rdp,telnet,etc...), but since that would defeat the purpose of me writing this blog, let's assume that in this particular situation you have just formatted your windows box in the other room and forgot to do this...(those of us running OpenBSD or some other *nix variant will use ssh if we have half a brain)

Anyway, long story short - use pstools. PsTools is a suite of applications originally developed by Sysinternals... Microsoft bought them eventually, so It's a microsoft product now I suppose... Even still, it's a very handy set of applications(especially for a network admin). The one that I use most often is psexec, so I will briefly cover some of the things you can pull off with it and leave the other applications in the suite for the reader to discover.

Psexec will allow you to remotely execute an application on another machine(As long as you have an account name and password handy for that box). It will allow you to execute a remote executable or copy an executable from your machine to the remote machine and execute it. You can also use psexec to run commands with the SYSTEM account, which has it's benefits at times.

*DETOUR*
Ever tried used Macrium Reflect to back up a system only to be constantly irritated with the NTFS Permissions from the image when attempting a restore? Launch a cmd shell as the SYSTEM account and you will be able to browse all of the files from your mounted image without troubles
*END DETOUR*

You launch a remote cmd shell from psexec to gain telnet-like access to a box without actually turning telnet on. Let's be honest - once you have a remote cmd shell, you can pretty much make any changes to the system that you would want to do, so I'll stop blogging right here.

*SIDE NOTE* - If you're running *nix, there is an application called winexe that will supposedly let you execute commands on a windows box remotely just like psexec. I have not tried this application yet, but it sounds promising.
Home of winexe

Go Download it and try it out
Home of PsTools