Invoking Methods on the Xplat agent with WINRM

So I was testing other stuff tonight, to be honest, but I got pinged on Instant Messenger by my geek friend and colleague Stefan Stranger who pointed me at his request for help here https://friendfeed.com/sstranger/4571f39b/help-needed-on-winrs-or-winrm-and-openwsman-to

He wanted to use WINRM or any other command line utility to interact with the Xplat agent, and call methods on the Unix machine from windows. This could be very useful to – for example – restart a service (in fact it is what the RECOVERY actions in the Xplat Management Packs do, btw).

At first I told him I had only tested enumerations – such as on this other post https://www.muscetta.com/2009/06/01/using-the-scx-agent-with-wsman-from-powershell-v2/ … but the question intrigued me, so I check out the help for winrm’s INVOKE verb:

Which told me that you can pass in the parameters for the method to be called/invoked either as an hashtable @{KEY=”value”;KEY2=”value”}, or as an input XML file. I first tried the XML file but I could not get its format right.

After a few more minutes of trying, I figured out the right syntax.

This one works, for example:

winrm invoke ExecuteCommand https://schemas.microsoft.com/wbem/wscim/1/cim-schema/2/SCX\_OperatingSystem?\_\_cimnamespace=root/scx @{command="ps";timeout="60"} -username:root -password:password -auth:basic -r:https://virtubuntu.huis.dom:1270/wsman -skipCACheck -encoding:UTF-8

Happy remote management of your unix systems from Windows :-)