2012R2 Core and Powershell Remoting

So you’ve installed your Windows server with 2012R2 Core and the first and only thing you’ll see when logging on are:

In my opinion it would have been better if the box would say powershell.exe instead of cmd.exe, but that’s my five cent.
Let’s start with running powershell instead by running powershell.exe.
A new server name could be nice instead of the default random name…

Rename-Computer server01

We probably want to set a static IP-address also, so let’s do that.

Get-NetIPInterface

Remember or write down the ifIndex of the Interface you want to set to static, in my case it’s number 12.

Remove-NetIPAddress –InterfaceIndex 12
Set-NetIPAddress –InterfaceIndex 12 –IPAddress 192.168.0.8 –PrefixLength 24 –DefaultGateway 192.168.0.1
Set-DNSClientServerAddress –InterfaceIndex 12 –ServerAddresses 192.168.0.1

If you like to add more DNS addresses, just use a comma-seperated list for
–ServerAddresses.

If you’re going to add the server to a domain, do like this, the Cmdlet will ask for credentials.

Add-Computer -DomainName Barrud

To activate the server

slmgr.vbs –ato

To enable Powershell Remoting this should do it…

Enable-PSRemoting

But for some reason it didn’t work for me, so I ended up doing this:

Set-NetFirewallRule –DisplayGroup (Get-NetFirewallRule|where DisplayGroup –like *remote*|select-object –ExpandProperty DisplayGroup) –Enabled True

And now it works 🙂