View Services/Manage Your Servers Without Ever Remoting In

If you are using Windows, chances are you find yourself remoting into one server or another on a regular basis to start and stop services or to take a gander at the event logs to figure out why the box mysteriously rebooted the other day at 2 am. You may not realize it, but you can access anything in the Computer Management console for your servers without ever remoting into them. This includes, users/groups, IIS, SQL Server, and device manager.Open up your local Computer Management Console. I have a shortcut to it on my quick launch. "%SystemRoot%\system32\compmgmt.msc /s" Click the "Action" menu and choose "Connect to another computer ...", click the "Another Computer" radio button, and type in the IP address of your remote computer or a host name that will resolve to it. The Management Console will refresh and you will be managing the remote computer. What you can do will obviously be based on your permissions. If you are using windows domain authentication and you are set up as an admin on the remote machine you should be good to go. I'm not exactly sure how Windows determines what you get otherwise. It would make sense for Windows to prompt you for a user name and password if neccessary, but it doesn't.