Enable Remote Desktop from PowerShell/WMI

The other day I had to connect to my dev box at work from home but I realized that I did not enable remote desktop on my machine at work so I could not connect to it. However, I knew that I have a remote desktop access to another machine in my office so I connected to it and tried to see if there is any way I can enable remote desktop on my dev box via WMI interface using PowerShell. I looked up online and found bits of information here and I enabled remote desktop but somehow I could not still remote desktop to my dev box. When I came to work next day I learned that I also had to enable firewall setting for remote desktop service. So here is my post on how to enable remote desktop on Windows 8.
First, we need to keep our credential information so that we do not have to enter it every time we connect to the remote machine.

$cred = Get-Credential

Then, let us check if remote desktop is enabled. This will tell us if we need to enable it.

PS C:\temp> Invoke-Command -computername dev-pc -scriptblock {(gwmi -class win32_terminalservicesetting -namespace "root\cimv2\terminalservices").allowtsconnections} -Credential $cred

If we need to enable it, run the following command.

PS C:\temp> Invoke-Command -computername dev-pc -scriptblock {(gwmi -class win32_terminalservicesetting -namespace "root\cimv2\terminalservices").setallowtsconnections(1)} -Credential $cred

Then, run the following one to make sure that authentication is required for remote desktop access.

PS C:\temp> invoke-command -computername dev-pc -scriptblock {(gwmi -class win32_tsgeneralsetting -namespace "root\cimv2\terminalservices").setuserauthenticationrequired(1)} -Credential $cred

The above step basically enables Remote Desktop on my dev-pc but the trouble I had was that I still could not connect to my dev box because of firewall so we need to take care of that as well. To do that, we will need to run one more command.

PS C:\temp> invoke-command -computername dev-pc -scriptblock {netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="remote desktop" new enable=Yes } -Credential $cred

Once we execute the last command, we are now able to remote desktop to remote computer.
Lastly, let me put two websites that I got the above scripts from to enable remote desktop.

• Microsoft support page: How to use the netsh advfirewall firewall
• Checking and enabling Remote Desktop with PowerShell