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The Windows runas command and the /netonly switch

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Mark Wilson

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Earlier today I needed to administer a Windows Server remotely, using a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in. Unfortunately, the computer I was using was in one domain and the remote server was in a workgroup, meaning that many of the MMC operations failed due to security issues. I tried running MMC as the administrator for the remote machine (using runas /user:remotecomputername\username mmc) but kept on getting a message that indicated an authentication failure:

RUNAS ERROR: Unable to run – mmc
1311: There are currently no logon servers available to service the logon request.

Then I found out about an obscure switch for the runas command – /netonly, used to indicate that the supplied credentials are for remote access only. By changing my command to:

runas /netonly /user:remotecomputername\username mmc

I was able to authenticate against the remote computer without needing the credentials to also be valid on the local computer, as described by Craig Andera.

Comments

3 responses to “The Windows runas command and the /netonly switch”

  1. A. Gupta avatar
    A. Gupta

    Thanks for this article, it solved my problem

  2. bob avatar
    bob

    Hi,
    I have a vista machine in a workgroup, and a 2008 machine in a workgroup. Using this command on the vista machine, logging in with the 2008 credentials does not allow the use of remote mmc consoles to connect to 2008 successfully.
    dammit

  3. davidbridge avatar
    davidbridge

    I used this method to connect to SQL Server Analysis Serives from a local computer using EXCEL 2010. Same principle exactly. I posted what I did on my blog.

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