PowerShell Remote – Start Command and Have It Finish Even If Disconnected

powershell

If I start a remote PowerShell session with:

Enter-PSSession -ComputerName somecomputer

Then I want to execute a long-running process:

[somecomputer]: PS C:\> C:\SomeApp\DoSomething.exe

If my remote session is disconnected for whatever reason – such as a local machine network outage or reboot – is there any way to ensure that the command still completes on the server?

From what I'm seeing, it seems to go away as soon as my PS session dies. I've also tried Start-Process, but it seems to behave the same.

I'm trying to run things on a server without having to RDP in. Still a beginner in PowerShell, so I'm sure there are plenty of things I'm missing. I'm on Win10, PowerShell 7, connecting to Windows Server 2016, but I assume it would be the same anywhere.

Best Answer

I think what you're looking for is New-PSsesion

Enter-PSSession: Starts a temporary interactive session with a remote computer. You can have only one interactive session at a time using Enter-PSSession. Exiting the session destroys it.

New-PSSession: Creates a PERSISTENT connection to a local or remote computer. Exiting the session does not destroy it, it is still available to connect to again unless you do something like Disconnect-PSSession or it times out.
Furthermore, with New-PSSession you can assign the session a Name or to a variable for easier re-use, etc.

Related Solutions

Windows – Use PowerShell to edit a remote file on a Windows 2008 Server

There isn't really a "good" way to do this the way you seem to want (short of installing an SSH server).

Two [barely] tolerable options are:

To open the file over a UNC share (even the default "admin" share, if you have access to it: \\servername\driveletter$\restofthepath\file)
To copy the file to the local machine, edit it, and then push it back to the remote server, overwriting the old version.

Powershell – Is it possible to get a windows-version from a powershell command on Windows Server 2016 Nano

You could try the following, I've not got a nano server to try it out on. Drop the select if it gets you something else and see if what you want is stored under a different property in Server 2016 Nano

Get-CIMInstance -ClassName Win32_OperatingSystem -Property * | select caption

When tested on a real Nano instance the -session parameter was not needed, but if you need it at some future date, here's the variant with -session:

$cuser = "Your username"
$cservername = "Your Servername"
$csession = New-CimSession –Credential $cuser –ComputerName $cservername
Get-CIMInstance –session $csession -ClassName Win32_OperatingSystem -Property * | select caption

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Windows – Use PowerShell to edit a remote file on a Windows 2008 Server

Powershell – Is it possible to get a windows-version from a powershell command on Windows Server 2016 Nano

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