Doing work on remote Windows servers not in a domain

Having to manage multiple servers from multiple customers that are not in a domain, you sometimes need to get creative when you need to script batchfiles.

Luckily, Microsoft has something that worked with Windows NT4 and still works with Windows 2008R2, provided there are no firewalls blocking you.

From the command prompt of your administrative pc, type:

net use \\hostnametomanage\ipc$ /user:adminuser password

If you get a "Command completed successfully" back, you are in luck. With psexec, available from the excellent sysinternals pstools suite you can now do everything on the remote server, as if it were done locally.

With that one command and psexec you can use batchscripting to do almost anything you want.