I’ve seen a couple questions about cross-domain PowerShell Remoting online this week. I do this often and actually just recently finally started building some tooling around making it easier to work with on a daily basis.

http://www.reddit.com/r/PowerShell/comments/37nw55/crossdomain_remoting/

@LogicalDiagram @jsnover @almostjulian @abhik501 Can you point me to solid directions, and what WMF versions are required?

— Rob Nelson (@rnelson0) May 28, 2015

I referenced this Scripting Guys article which has some good information on remoting to an untrusted domain.

My Simple Steps

There is more than one way to do this it seems, but here is basically what I did.

1. Run WinRM Quickconfig on each server. Here’s a hint on doing that in bulk.
2. Build a trusted hosts list and run Set-Item wsman:\localhost\Client\TrustedHosts -value $list on my desktop. $list is a string with a comma-delimited list of hosts.

That will allow you to create sessions using Enter-PSSession -ComputerName someRemoteHost -Credential remoteDomain\myUser. That’s fine, but it’s a bit to type, even using the etsn alias and not using named parameters. I also wanted to create a bunch of sessions at once so I could manage a group of servers together.

First, I followed this post to create a text file with my encrypted credential. With that, I don’t have to provide a [PSCredential] everytime I start up a new session.

My Module

function Register-ServerRemoteSession
{
    [CmdletBinding()]
    [Alias('rrs')]
    Param
    (
        # Param1 help description
        [Parameter(Mandatory, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName, Position=0)]
        [string]
        $ComputerName,

        # Param1 help description
        [Parameter(ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName, Position=1)]
        [string]
        $SessionName,

        # Param2 help description
        [Parameter(Position=2)]
        [PSCredential]
        $Credential
    )

    Begin
    {
        if (-not $PSBoundParameters.Credential){
            $MyCredential = New-Object -TypeName System.Management.Automation.PSCredential `
                -ArgumentList "remotedomain\myuser", (Get-Content "$($profile | Split-Path)\myuser.txt" | ConvertTo-SecureString)
        }
        else 
        {
            $MyCredential = $Credential
        }

    }
    Process
    {        
        New-PSSession -ComputerName $ComputerName -Name $SessionName -Credential $MyCredential
    }

}

function Unregister-ServerRemoteSession
{
    [CmdletBinding(DefaultParameterSetName='ComputerName')]
    [Alias('urs')]
    Param
    (
        # Param1 help description
        [Parameter(ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName, Position=0, ParameterSetName='ComputerName')]
        [string]
        $ComputerName,

        # Param1 help description
        [Parameter(ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName, Position=1, ParameterSetName='SessionName')]
        [string]
        $SessionName
    )

    Process
    {        
        if ($PSBoundParameters.ComputerName)
        {
            Remove-PSSession -ComputerName $ComputerName
        }
        else
        {
            Remove-PSSession -Name $SessionName
        }
    }
}

Export-ModuleMember -Function *-ServerRemoteSession -Alias rrs, urs

Using the module

The automatic credential object creation is all hardcoded so you would need to change that.

In my profile, I created some variables with some predefined server lists like this.

$webservers = @(
                [pscustomobject]@{'ComputerName'='10.1.2.80'; 'SessionName'='web1'},
                [pscustomobject]@{'ComputerName'='10.1.2.81'; 'SessionName'='web2'},
                [pscustomobject]@{'ComputerName'='10.1.2.82'; 'SessionName'='web3'}
)

So, I can pipe that object to Register-ServerRemoteSession.

PS C:\> $webservers | rrs

 Id Name            ComputerName    State         ConfigurationName     Availability
 -- ----            ------------    -----         -----------------     ------------
  3 web1            10.1.2.80       Opened        Microsoft.PowerShell  Available
  4 web2            10.1.2.81       Opened        Microsoft.PowerShell  Available
  5 web3            10.1.2.82       Opened        Microsoft.PowerShell  Available

And now I have a bunch of open sessions and I can pop into one with etsn -n web1.

Or I can run a command across all open sessions.

PS C:\> Invoke-Command -Session (Get-PSSession) -ScriptBlock {Get-EventLog -Newest 10 -LogName Application}

I hope to clean up the module and post it officially in the near future.