Windows Tip Sheet
Things Fall Apart
What to do when installing WinXP SP2 breaks your WMI scripts.
This tip is part 4 in a series of 5 on living with Windows XP Service Pack
2.
WinXP SP2 may do marvelous things for security, but they sure don’t feel
marvelous when they break Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), one of the
most often-used tools of administrators writing administrative scripts. Something
like half the scripts I’d written for Windows Administrator’s
Automation Toolkit stopped working in my lab environment after I installed
SP2, meaning I had some work ahead of me. I narrowed most of the problems down,
not to mere script bugs, but rather to changes made in WMI’s security
-- more properly, Distributed COM (DCOM) security -- by SP2.
Of course, Microsoft knows all about it -- they wrote SP2, after all -- and
they wrote a Knowledge Base article to explain everything.
Essentially, you need to allow for remote administration through the Windows
Firewall, modify the DCOM Remote Launch permissions so that the user account
running the remote script has launch permissions, and open the DCOM port in
the Windows Firewall. You can do a lot of this with Group Policy, which is convenient.
More Resources:
About the Author
Don Jones is a multiple-year recipient of Microsoft’s MVP Award, and is Curriculum Director for IT Pro Content for video training company Pluralsight. Don is also a co-founder and President of PowerShell.org, a community dedicated to Microsoft’s Windows PowerShell technology. Don has more than two decades of experience in the IT industry, and specializes in the Microsoft business technology platform. He’s the author of more than 50 technology books, an accomplished IT journalist, and a sought-after speaker and instructor at conferences worldwide. Reach Don on Twitter at @concentratedDon, or on Facebook at Facebook.com/ConcentratedDon.