#14 Please support attaching to a currently open user session

[Seppo Yli-Olli]

PsExec supports both remote commands through logon but also attaching to currently open user session. Winexe should support both of these things as well. The latter is especially useful if the machine is set to have autologin on and it allows for monitoring what's happening in the remote machine with, e.g., VNC.

[Thomas Hood]

Is this the same request as #8?

https://sourceforge.net/p/winexe/feature-requests/8/

[Seppo Yli-Olli]

Not quite. I'm not asking to be allowed to tell the session name, just in general connect to already open session. --interactive in theory should do this, it doesn't seem to for us. If this functionality should already exist, please trash this and I'll try to validate on Monday if the fact that it doesn't work for us is because of a winexe bug or us using winexe wrong. :) Feature request 8 is definitely valid but unrelated.

[Thomas Hood]

I think that connecting to an already open session was also the gist of request #8. If that is the case, may I close this request so that you can add your comments to request #8?

[Seppo Yli-Olli]

Mainly yes, except that one is specifically about --interactive with parameters. This is about how --interactive works without parameters. But yes, trash this one. The docs say: "Desktop interaction: 0 - disallow, 1 - allow. If allow, also use the --system switch (Windows requirement). Vista does not support this option" So if I'm reading right, ability to attach to currently running session should exist with combination of --system and --interactive but it's just broken in winexe (according to docs) for Vista and later. Didn't have time today to take a look at it more extensively, had a deadline on academic writing. Anyway, I don't want to pass a session id. Request #8 is only about passing that. I just want it to connect to logged in session without passing session id since in our case I don't have that anyway.

[ahajda]

The story behind it is different, --interactive and --system winexe options are directly mapped to respective windows service options, so those options works as windows allows and this is quite complicated story. In short it worked somehow till Windows XP/2003, after that MS realized there is security issue with it and they started to disable it in next windows. Instead they created API which allows to connect to specific session, psexec implemented it winexe not (yet).

[Thomas Hood]

• Description has changed:

Diff:

--- old
+++ new
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-PsExec supports both remote commands through logon but also attaching to currently open user session. Winexe should support both of these things as well. The latter is especially useful if the machine is set to have autologin on and it allows for monitoring what's happening in the remote machine with eg VNC
+PsExec supports both remote commands through logon but also attaching to currently open user session. Winexe should support both of these things as well. The latter is especially useful if the machine is set to have autologin on and it allows for monitoring what's happening in the remote machine with, e.g., VNC.

• status: incomplete --> open