Remote Deployment with BeyondExec

One fine morning you, the administrator, discover a major virus threat
worldwide. And then to your relief, find a patch for that particular virus. You
download the patch (which is essentially an MSI file) and plan to deploy it on
to a workstation. Traditionally, you would need a Remote Deployment Server to do
so. But what if the network is not so big to warrant a full-fledged remote
deployment server (let's say you are at a branch office with 20 machines).

You will then manually go to each of the twenty machines and install the
patch. While you manage to get the patch installed, this does affect the
productivity of the organization. More importantly, it leaves more time for the
system to be open to threats. 

Applies To: Network administrators Price: Free USP: Run remote commands and do remote deployment with a one small tool Primary Link: www.beyondlogic.org/solutions/ remoteprocess/BeyondExec.htm  Google Keywords: beyondexec, remote execution

To solve such problems, here is something that can do remote deployment of
small packages, execute commands remotely and can also log off or shutdown
remote networked PCs. And all this being done without connecting the machines to
a domain. The name of the tool is BeyondExec and it's just a single command
sized 46.5 KB. It's a freeware and works with any Windows version from NT
onward.

Nothing to configure

Yes, you actually do not need to configure or set up anything to make BeyondExec
work, except downloading it to your server (the controlling machine). Instead
you have to make a slight change to your Win XP/2003 client machines. This has
to be done once on all the client machines if they are a part of any
workstation.

For this, run gpedit.msc from Start> Run. Once open, go to 'Computer
Configuration>Windows Settings >Local Policies>Security Options'. Now
on the right side of the window, scroll down to the option called 'Network
Access: Sharing and security model for local accounts' and

double click on it.

Open gpedit in MMC and select 'Network access' inside Security Settings>Local Policies>Security Option

Here change the value of the option from 'Guest only' to Classic. Now
Save the settings in the file menu and quit the window.

Using the tool

Using BeyondExec is very simple. And there are multiple ways in which you can
use the tool. So let's take some examples and see how to work with it. For
instance, if you want to use this tool to execute some command on any remote
machine. The syntax should look something

like the one shown below.

:>\beyondexec \\computer —u Administrator
—p

Here, replace '\\computer' with the name of the computer on which you
want to run the command on and replace the with the name of
the application you want to run remotely. To get a remote terminal to any
machine (like Telnet) you can run ':>\beyondexec \\computer'.

Double click on 'Network access' option and change the value to Classic. This will enable remote commands to be executed

To remotely copy a file to a machine and then run it, you can use:

:>\beyondexec \\computer —cs

Here replace the filename.msi with the name of the MSI file you want to first
send to and remote computer and then execute. To shutdown a remote machine, you
can run the following command.

:>\beyondexec \\computer —d shutdown —f

This is a small list of what you can do with this tool. But if you are
looking for more list of switches, just run

':>\beyondexec /?'.

This lets you do more than just remote deployment.