Chapter 1. Diagnosing and troubleshooting PowerShell remoting
Troubleshooting and diagnosing remoting can be one of the most difficult tasks for an administrator. When remoting works, it works; when it doesn’t, it’s often hard to tell why. Fortunately, PowerShell v3 and its accompanying implementation of remoting offer much clearer and more prescriptive error messages than prior versions. But even v2 included an undocumented and little-appreciated module named PSDiagnostics, which was designed specifically to facilitate remoting troubleshooting. The module lets you turn on detailed trace log information before you attempt to initiate a remoting connection. You can then use that detailed log information to get a better idea of where remoting is failing.
In this chapter I’ll walk you through several troubleshooting examples. The idea is to help you recognize specific failure situations so that you’ll know what to do in each case to get things working. Each example focuses on a single scenario, such as a failed or blocked connection.
For the following scenarios I started by importing the PSDiagnostics module (note that this is implemented as a script module and requires an execution policy that permits it to run, such as RemoteSigned or Unrestricted). Figure 1 also shows that I ran the Enable-PSWSManCombinedTrace command, which starts the extended diagnostics logging.
