HI all, When I run psexec @Gaydamak ipconfig, it took so long and if some servers inside @Gaydamak are not up, pseexec could wait for almost 2 minutes. Is there a way to set retry time or timeout to be short like 1 sec? BTW, multiple servers name inside file . Thank you!

Documentation for PsExec is here . It says to use the -n parameter to specify a timeout connecting to the server. This seems like it would solve the issue of the server being unavailable. ipconfig should be a fast call so I don't know that you would need to do anything else but passing a list of files to psexec means it'll run them one by one. If you need even "faster" results then don't pass a list of computers to the command but instead use Powershell's parallel capability to start a separate psexec process/job for each computer (or batch if there are a lot of them) and let them run in parallel. You can read more about that here . To give you an idea of the impact suppose you had 10 servers and each one took 1 second to run your command. The total time would be 10 seconds (+ overhead). However if you started them all at once (within limits) then they would run concurrently and potentially be done in 1 second (+ overhead).

psexec against list of servers

Accepted answer

Michael Taylor 47,626 Reputation points

2022-06-29T15:18:06.623+00:00

Documentation for PsExec is here. It says to use the -n parameter to specify a timeout connecting to the server. This seems like it would solve the issue of the server being unavailable.

ipconfig should be a fast call so I don't know that you would need to do anything else but passing a list of files to psexec means it'll run them one by one. If you need even "faster" results then don't pass a list of computers to the command but instead use Powershell's parallel capability to start a separate psexec process/job for each computer (or batch if there are a lot of them) and let them run in parallel. You can read more about that here. To give you an idea of the impact suppose you had 10 servers and each one took 1 second to run your command. The total time would be 10 seconds (+ overhead). However if you started them all at once (within limits) then they would run concurrently and potentially be done in 1 second (+ overhead).
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Matt 101 Reputation points

2022-06-29T20:51:11.203+00:00

Thank you for the help. tried -n switch and time did not change.
What I am trying to do is to register DHCP clients again, delete DNS A record and then run ipconfig /registerdns
since the DNS A record is gone, I use psexec to against client IPs for ipconfig /registerdns

Unfortunately I don't have much knowledge of how to create Powershell script, if you have better way to do,
can you share?

Thank you!

Michael Taylor 47,626 Reputation points

2022-06-29T21:07:57.663+00:00

Are you sure the speed issue is with reaching unavailable servers or is it the actual ipconfig calls you're making on each server? Modify your file to contain only a couple of server names that don't exist. Then use the -n 5 switch. It should take 5 * # of servers in your file before it returns.

As for writing the PS code to enumerate your servers is the file just a list of IP addresses or does it contain something more?

Matt 101 Reputation points

2022-06-30T00:04:35.597+00:00

file is txt file which only contains IP as below:

10.1.1.1 10.2.2.2 10.3.3.3

Michael Taylor 47,626 Reputation points

2022-06-30T05:06:43.957+00:00

In that case read the file in PS and then use foreach to execute the psexec on each machine in parallel. Perhaps something like this.

$machines = Get-Content @file foreach -parallel -ThrottleLimit 5 ($machine in $machines) { psexec $machine ipconfig }

In theory this would read your file into an array of machines. For each machine it would then (in parallel but limited to 5 at a time) execute the psexec on that machine. You can do whatever you need to for each machine but the looping itself is done in parallel. In theory (barring the throttle limit) the code should finish after the slowest request finishes (plus overhead).

Matt 101 Reputation points

2022-06-30T15:46:06.36+00:00

@Michael Taylor , great thanks for your continuing help. tried the above PS, got the message "parallel" can be only used within the workflow.
BTW, -n 5 works.
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psexec against list of servers

10.1.1.1 10.2.2.2 10.3.3.3

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