PowerShell provides some commands to manipulate services, but that doesn’t work on remote computers! The script you can find below demonstrates that stopping a service on a remote computer using Stop-Service is not working.
First I verify that the MSDTC service is running on the local machine and a remote machine: server2. If I want to stop the service on both machines I use the Stop-Service cmdlet. But this command doesn’t work on server2 when I’m piping the output from Get-Service to Stop-Service! 🙁
There are two solutions. The first is you can use the InputObject parameter as part of Stop-Service.
You can also use WMI to stop a remote service. Just retreive the specific service from a remote computer by using the Get-WmiObject cmdlet and use the StopService method to stop the service.
WMI is intended to work remote so this command gives the correct result! 🙂
"Verifying services"
Get-Service MSDTC
Get-Service MSDTC -computer server2
"Stopping services"
Get-Service MSDTC | Stop-Service
Get-Service MSDTC -computer server2 | Stop-Service # Stop-Service does not accept pipelined input!
"Verifying services."
Get-Service MSDTC
Get-Service MSDTC -computer server2
"Stopping remote service, alternative"
Stop-Service -InputObject (Get-Service MSDTC -ComputerName server2)
"Stopping remote service using WMI"
(Get-WmiObject win32_service -computer server2 | Where { $_.name -eq 'MSDTC' }).stopservice()
Thanks to Martin Tengvall for pointing out the -InputObject variant.