Unable to use `psexec -i` to launch into interactive session

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AdamHupp-3979 asked Apr 8, '22 MotoX80 edited Apr 9, '22

Unable to use `psexec -i` to launch into interactive session

I'm connecting to a windows machine over ssh and trying to launch a GUI app in an existing interactive session using psexec -i. This fails in various ways depending on the program being run. In all of these cases my logged in user (as reported by whoami) is the same as the user of that interactive session.

psexec -i 1 notepad.exe: notepad crashes without showing UI
psexec -i 1 cmd.exe: I get a black box the size of a cmd.exe window, it never renders. If I look at the window title with "alt-tab", it does say this is an [Administrator] process which is not what I expected.
psexec -i 1 <path to vscode>, it launches successfully but then raises a number of errors related to credential storage.
psexec -s -i 1 cmd.exe: this launches fine, but the process is running as nt authority\system, which is not what I want.
psexec -i 1 -u my_user -p my_pwd <path to vscode>: this works fine, but I can't require passwords and want to use ssh key-based auth instead.

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong, or better ways to accomplish this?

windows-sysinternals-pstools

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Answer 1 · 2022-04-08T12:50:25.22Z

SimonBurbery-9608 answered Apr 8, '22 AdamHupp-3979 commented Apr 8, '22

You could try remote PowerShell:
Invoke-Command –ComputerName RemoteComputerName –ScriptBlock {Start-Process notepad.exe}

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AdamHupp-3979 · Apr 08 at 05:36 PM

Unfortunately, for this use the client needs to have minimal dependencies so I can't require installing linux powershell.

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Answer 2 · 2022-04-09T13:14:37.617Z

MotoX80 answered Apr 9, '22 MotoX80 edited Apr 9, '22

Just to be clear... you have a Windows PC and some account is logged on to the desktop. From a Linux machine you are using SSH to connect to the WinPC using that same account. From there you are using psexec and you are trying to launch some process that is then visible to the user who is logged on to the WinPC desktop. Correct?

You can use the task scheduler to launch an interactive process.

 SCHTASKS /create /tn Notepad /sc once /tr "notepad.exe" /ru interactive /st 00:00 /f
 SCHTASKS /run /tn Notepad
 SCHTASKS /delete /tn Notepad /f

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AdamHupp-3979 · Apr 09 at 04:16 PM

Yes, that summary is correct. schtasks is my current solution and it works ok; my hope for psexec is that I could get clearer error reporting when things go wrong. Thanks!

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MotoX80 AdamHupp-3979 · Apr 09 at 04:54 PM

  -i         Run the program so that it interacts with the desktop of the
             specified session on the remote system. If no session is
             specified the process runs in the console session.

Instead of "-i 1" try just "-i".

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