What services are required for remote service management?

[Entity]

If I'm trying to remotely stop/start services on a Windows 2000 box (on a domain which I have domain admin privileges on), what services are required to be running on a local machine so that I can manage those services remotely using sc or Computer Management?

We've got a computer lab setup where I run WinVNC; however, VNC has a tendency to shutdown every so often. It unfortunately doesn't report itself as a failed service, so I have to manually go into the machines to restart the service; for some reason, I can get in on one machine, but not the other 10. I get this message if tyring to use sc (from WinXP):

[SC] OpenSCManager FAILED 1722:

The RPC server is unavailable.

RPC, however, seems to be running on the machines (both RPC and RPC Locator, IIRC). What else should I check?

When I try to manage the computer through computer management, I get:

Computer cannot be managed. Windows cannot find the network path.

Ideas?

Rob

 

[Lord Evermore]

Remote Registry probably needs to be running. But that's just a guess.

This is all I could find:

The ?RPC server unavailable? error can occur for the following reasons:

DNS problems
Time synchronization problem
RPC service is not running
Network connectivity problem

One resolution seems to be stopping and restarting the RPC service. But then, you can't actually stop the RPC service. But DNS seems to be the other more common problem. Not a whole lot of information available that I can find.

 

[Entity]

Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
Remote Registry probably needs to be running. But that's just a guess.

This is all I could find:

The ?RPC server unavailable? error can occur for the following reasons:

DNS problems
Time synchronization problem
RPC service is not running
Network connectivity problem

One resolution seems to be stopping and restarting the RPC service. But then, you can't actually stop the RPC service. But DNS seems to be the other more common problem. Not a whole lot of information available that I can find.

Hmm. They're all on static IPs, and have appropriate DNS entries in our DNS server. Bleh.

Rob

 

[NogginBoink]

The "RPC Server" you're hearing about in this error means the service on the remote server that listens and responds to your remote "Start a service" or "stop a service" requests. It's not the rpc service itself.

I would guess perhaps windows management instrumentation first. But I don't know for sure.