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powershellcmdsolarwinds-orion

Can you run quser with a PSCredential object?

Question

I'm writing SolarWinds SAM script that can monitor logged in users on a remote machine. I wanted to use quser rather than a WMI/CIM based solution because quser provides exactly the data that i'm looking for.

The kicker is that the monitoring application provides a PSCredential object to use in order to authenticate with remote machines, something that quser can't use.

Code

When running with no credential object I get the following.

quser /server:'testserver1'

Output

No User exists for *
Solution

  • Answer

    The answer to this dilemma was painfully obvious once I realized it. You can simply use the Invoke-Command cmdlet with the -Credential and -ScriptBlock parameter to run the quser command on the remote server with the appropriate user context.

    One final note - if you need help parsing the output of quser into a more PowerShell friendly object, see Get-LoggedOnUser. It's a fantastic script that handles all of the string parsing necessary to get the properties from the quser output.

    Code

    $Server = 'testserver1'
$Credential = Get-Credential
Invoke-Command -ComputerName $Server -ScriptBlock { quser } -Credential $Credential

    Output

     USERNAME              SESSIONNAME        ID  STATE   IDLE TIME  LOGON TIME
 a-srz                 rdp-tcp#0           2  Active         19  6/2/2020 10:19 AM