Remote Access to WMI on a WinXP SP2 Machine

[Ross Bellinger]

I've been using WMI remotely for a while now to collect information from
remote machines. Unfortunately I've run into some issues with newly
installed XP SP2 machinesand I can't seem to find a solution.

When attempting to remotely connect to WMI on an XP SP2 machine I'm getting
the following error:
Number: 0x800706ba
Facility: Win32
Description: The RPC server is unavailable.

This occurs both in an application I have written to communicate with WMI,
and using Microsoft's WBEMTEST program. It seems to think that RPC is not
running on the XP SP2 machine. I have tinkered on the target machine,
obvisouly the first thing I did was turn off the firewall, but to no avail.
I can run WBEMTEST on the XP SP2 machine and connect to itself so I do know
WMI is running and working properly. Somewhere I assume some security
settings have been pumped up and I need to change them. I have looked into
the Component Services properties via the Control Panel, DCOM is enabled and
I am using an administrative level account (although I should get an Access
error if account permissions are incorrect, not an RPC Server unavailable
error).

Any ideas or suggestions? I'm also having the same issue with Remote
Registry connections but I'll tackle that next...

Thanks for any input.

 

[Ross Bellinger]

Ah, nevermind. Burned once again by the "Classic/Guest" settings in the
Security Policy for remote connections on a WinXP Pro machine in a workgroup
(not Domain).

 

[David Holcomb]

You might also try opening up the appropriate port to allow getting through the firewall:

netsh firewall set service type=remoteadmin mode=enable scope=all profile=all