WinRM in Workgroup Environments

Just a quick blog post this time, mainly focusing on some configuration items you “may” need to do if you are working with WinRM, in particular in workgroup environments. These are settings you may need to configure client side when trying to interact with servers. You probably saw these in the notes section of Get-WinRMPassword.

Firstly, how do you view your configuration?

winrm get winrm/config

Next, if you are connecting to systems where HTTP listeners have been configured on the server, if your running on a later Windows Client, you will need to allow for the connection to be made. By default “unencrypted” that is HTTP sessions will not be allowed.

winrm set winrm/config/service @{AllowUnencrypted="true"}

Now I recommend enabling basic auth, just incase.

winrm set winrm/config/client/auth @{Basic="true"}

Finally, the server a client connects to, actually needs to be listed in trusted hosts. This can be done like this:

winrm set winrm/config/client @{TrustedHosts="myserver"}

Note that the command above will clear any other trusted host entries you might have.

And that is pretty much all you need to do!

The easiest to understand guides are (in no particular order):

• vCenter Orchestrator Plug-Ins - Configure WinRM to Use HTTP
• vCenter Orchestrator Plug-Ins - Configure WinRM to Use HTTPS
• Installation and Configuration for Windows Remote Management
• Authentication for Remote Connections

DirectAccess Resources

So I have been spending quite a significant amount of time working on DirectAccess and generally talking to people about DirectAccess, remote access and working remotely in generally over the past few months.

DirectAccess was a technology that I had wanted to work with for a significantly long period of time, the concept of an always on VPN like it has always interested me. I was extremely excited to be given the opportunity to work with it!

Not only did I get the opportunity to deploy DirectAccess in an enterprise environment, but I also had the chance to share my experience with the Brisbane Infrastructure Group.  My presentation can be found here.

So I thought why not provide you all with links to some of the resources that I used during my deployment of DirectAccess

Blogs:

Richard Hicks (MVP DirectAccess)	http://directaccess.richardhicks.com/
Tom Shinder (MVP DirectAccess / TMMG)	http://blogs.technet.com/b/tomshinder
Iron Networks	http://www.ironnetworks.com/blog/

Specific articles you should read:

http://directaccessguide.com/2013/10/07/setting-up-single-nic-directaccess-servers-with-an-external-load-balancer/

http://www.ivonetworks.com/news/2013/10/is-isatap-required-for-directaccess/

http://www.ironnetworks.com/blog/application-compatibility-issues-microsoft-directaccess

http://www.ironnetworks.com/blog/directaccess-network-location-server-considerations

http://www.ironnetworks.com/blog/common-directaccess-implementation-mistakes

http://blog.kloud.com.au/2013/08/22/lync-2010-directaccess-audio-video-and-application-sharing-troubleshooting/

There are probably some links missing, if there are other things that I realise I have missed, I will update this post.