Since the introduction of UAC in Windows Vista, the ability to remotely execute commands that require elevated privileges has been blocked. This is even the case when you use credentials of an administrator account on the target computer. This, while an inconvenience, is intentional. Microsoft reports that people should interactively log on to the computer as an administrator using Remote Desktop or Remote Assistance.
Well, I don’t want to have to always do this, nor am I able to from certain machines. The way to get around it is to disable the UAC remote restrictions in the registry be doing the following:
- In the registry editor, navigate to HKLMSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPoliciesSystem.
- If needed, create the DWORD value LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy.
- Modify the value of LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy by changing the Value data to 1.
I can’t recall whether the change required a reboot or restart of some service before the desired effects could been seen, but you should now be able to visit administrative shares and issue commands like net rpc shutdown (which was what I was after) remotely.
You can refer to the following Microsoft knowledge base article for some details and more in-depth instructions at the following:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951016#letmefixit
Also, there is a Wikipedia article that outlines this same process for administrative shares:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_share
