Member Avatar for ctrl-alt-del

Good day all!

Recently I have started working for a law firm of considerable size (as ICT support). Since helping out users is a big part of my daily work, and I do have lots of other things to do, I would like things to run as efficiently as possible. (Plus, the initiative shown by this can't hurt)

We have everything from remote desktops, to deployment servers, and what not all. We however often run into basic problems that can be solved real fast by some basic taskmanager stuff. You know, kill one task, start another, maybe another, done.
I would LOVE to have a tool that can connect to a remote computer and present me with a list of all tasks and give me control over those (kill a task, or start a new one). Or for extreme convenience, give me a list of all the computers on the left, and then supply me with a taskmanager-like view in the main part of the screen.

Everything is hooked up to the domain so rights aren't an issue, and the program can be installed using administrator rights, and even run under those if required

Now I have seen tools like PsExec and PsKill. They work nice enough, running the credentials through, notifying eventvwr, etc. I can't process that though (or I don't know how)


Now my question is this:
- Is there a way to parse those remote processes, given that I have more then enough rights to the machine?
- Would it be better to create a local program that runs constantly, then connect to it from my computer which then sends a command to upload the processes list, from which I can send a command back to either kill or start a process?

Can anybody point me in the right direction? I'm not that advanced in programming but very eager to learn, and reading a lot, and learning as I go. I've seen some remote options through WMI, though I haven't looked into that yet


Anybody have some clues?

Thanks a lot in advance.

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Member Avatar for finito

This is the more favored method but it will show up on your antivirus right away as this basically a back door.

It would be easier to program as well

Member Avatar for ctrl-alt-del

Would it also do so when it parses the network credentials? Or what if I hardcode a password and username into the program (we have a maintenance account for such things that has ample rights)

If worse comes to end it might be possible to have an exception added to the virusscanner. Though management will probably not like that at all.


Any clues/hints?

Member Avatar for ctrl-alt-del

Okay, so at the moment I have strong motives towards WMI. System.Management is a brilliant thing.
So far it has offered me the ability to let the system decide what my credentials are worth in the network environment and it will also offer me the ability to set up a logging system so if I or any of my colleagues manipulates a system in any way, shape, or form, it will be logged under their credentials.

At this moment I am still running into some problems though.
When I let it connect to a computer that isn't turned on, or might just be unresponsive, it waits for like 23 second or something before crashing. Now I can let it handle the error or just handle it gracefully with a nice loop that will let it indicate whether it is online or not. However, I would still like to keep that time out to something like 5 seconds. And split it up in threads or something (I'll read up on that later)

Any clues how I might manage such a thing?

Thanks in advance

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