[chef] Bootstrapping Windows Nodes via RDP

[Chris McClimans < >]

winrm is disabled by default for many windows installs, including cloud providers such as Azure.

I'm contemplating a way around this limitation by either finding a way to turn on winrm, or just executing commands via RDP instead.

I found an interesting from blog entry from 2008*[1] that suggested using the rdesktop executable (on linux) to run commands/scripts.

rdesktop -r disk:local="/tmp/dir/" my.new.server -s "cmd.exe /K net use x: \\\\tsclient\local & x:\setupwinrm.bat & shutdown /t 0 /r"

However that obviously requires shelling out to run a binary on Linux that requires the presence of an X server.

I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions or has seen any ruby gems or libraries that we could use to make something like this cross-platform.

The ideal scenario would give us the ability to run commands via the RDP procotol from plain ruby (no X or Linux required).

Then we could do something like:

knife bootstrap windows rdp my.new.server

[1] http://www.singularity.be/2008/03/using-rdesktop-to-script-windows.html