PowerShell: Start and stop services on remote computer with alternate credentials
I received a comment yesterday on most popular post of my blog(http://techibee.com/powershell/startstoprestart-service-on-remote-computer-with-powershell/693) asking for a way to start, stop, restart services using alternate credentials. I thought about it for some time and came up with below script.
Note that I am not going to use built-in cmdlets like get-service, start-service, stop-service in here since they don’t have an option to provide alternate credentials. Instead I am replying on WMI class Win32_Process which allows me to pass the credentials when I use through Get-WMIObject cmdlet.
Here is the code.
$credential = Get-Credential $myservice = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Service -ComputerName SERVER1 ` -Credential $credential -Filter "Name='spooler'" $myservice.stopservice()
It is that simple. Similarly if you want to start the service just use “startservice” method like given below.
$credential = Get-Credential $myservice = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Service -ComputerName SERVER1 ` -Credential $credential -Filter "Name='spooler'" $myservice.startservice()
Hope this helps and this article also gains some popularity.
An alternative, if you have PowerShell remoting enabled is to use Invoke-Command:
invoke-command {Restart-Service spooler} -comp Server1-cred $credential
This is especially handy if you want to manage a service on multiple machines.