Using PowerShell credentials without being prompte

Question

I'd like to restart a remote computer that belongs to a domain. I have an administrator account but I don't know how to use it from powershell.

I know that there is a Restart-Computer cmdlet and that I can pass credential but if my domain is for instance mydomain, my username is myuser and my password is mypassword what's the right syntax to use it?

I need to schedule the reboot so I don't have to type the password.

Answer 1

I saw one example that uses Import/Export-CLIXML.

These are my favorite commands for the issue you're trying to resolve. And the simplest way to use them is.

$passwordPath = './password.txt'
if (-not (test-path $passwordPath)) {
    $cred = Get-Credential -Username domain\username -message 'Please login.'
    Export-Cli -InputObject $cred -Path $passwordPath
}
$cred = Import-CliXML -path $passwordPath

So if the file doesn't locally exist it will prompt for the credentials and store them. This will take a [pscredential] object without issue and will hide the credentials as a secure string.

Finally just use the credential like you normally do.

Restart-Computer -ComputerName ... -Credentail $cred

Note on Securty:

Securely store credentials on disk

When reading the Solution, you might at first be wary of storing a password on disk. While it is natural (and prudent) to be cautious of littering your hard drive with sensitive information, the Export-CliXml cmdlet encrypts credential objects using the Windows standard Data Protection API. This ensures that only your user account can properly decrypt its contents. Similarly, the ConvertFrom-SecureString cmdlet also encrypts the password you provide.

Edit: Just reread the original question. The above will work so long as you've initialized the [pscredential] to the hard disk. That is if you drop that in your script and run the script once it will create that file and then running the script unattended will be simple.

Answer 2

I have to run SCOM 2012 functions from a remote server that requires a different credential. I avoid clear-text passwords by passing the output of a password decryption function as input to ConvertTo-SecureString. For clarity, this is not shown here.

I like to strongly type my declarations. The type declaration for $strPass works correctly.

[object] $objCred = $null
[string] $strUser = 'domain\userID'
[System.Security.SecureString] $strPass = '' 

$strPass = ConvertTo-SecureString -String "password" -AsPlainText -Force
$objCred = New-Object -TypeName System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -ArgumentList ($strUser, $strPass)

Answer 3

There is another way, but...

DO NOT DO THIS IF YOU DO NOT WANT YOUR PASSWORD IN THE SCRIPT FILE (It isn't a good idea to store passwords in scripts, but some of us just like to know how.)

Ok, that was the warning, here's the code:

$username = "John Doe"
$password = "ABCDEF"
$secstr = New-Object -TypeName System.Security.SecureString
$password.ToCharArray() | ForEach-Object {$secstr.AppendChar($_)}
$cred = new-object -typename System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -argumentlist $username, $secstr

$cred will have the credentials from John Doe with the password "ABCDEF".

Alternative means to get the password ready for use:

$password = convertto-securestring -String "notverysecretpassword" -AsPlainText -Force