Administering Windows from the command line

I sometimes forget that you can do a lot via the command line with Windows. When Unix Admins complain about having to Windows administration, my usual response is "Come on, it's clicky-clicky. Just click around and you'll figure it out." In the past two days, I came across two blog posts that reminded me that you're not necessarily stuck with having to use GUI programs to administer Windows.

The first blog post I came across was posted today about an alternative to running programs remotely on Windows hosts.

http://standalone-sysadmin.blogspot.com/2008/10/issue-remote-commands-to-windows.html

Apparently SysInternals distributed a group of tools called PsTools, which included a utility called PsExec. PsExec allows a user to remotely execute commands on a Windows host. I'm not sure what the security implications are using these utilities. Any time someone uses "telnet" in their description of remote administration, it makes me a bit nervous.

Less than an hour later, I came across this blog post that was written yesterday that makes for a nice supplement to the Standalone Sysadmin post.

http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2008/10/what-to-do-on-windows.html

It points to another blog discussing useful Windows commands that can be running from the DOS command prompt. I knew all about "net start", "net stop", and some other useful commands to use, but it definitely covers some I didn't know (ex. netsh).