I have a physical XP SP2 box. On it, I have VMWare with a virtual XP machine (bridged). The virtual machine is called vxp1. It is the only virtual machine. I can ping it from the physical XP by ip address and name. And vice-versa. A local admin account exists called admin with a password admin1. I have PSExec on the physical machine. If I type in a cmd from the physical XP box:-

psexec \\vxp1 -p admin -u admin -p admin1 cmd

I get the msg:-

Couldnt access vxp1:

Logon failure: unkown username or password.

Now, the only help I have received is that someone suggested that both machines need to be on a domain and use a domain username.

Is that correct?

If not, what else do I need to get this working?

Hope someone knows!

From the help:

note that file paths must be absolute paths on the target system

So, try this:

psexec \\vxp1 -u admin -p admin1 -i C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe

Thanks for the reply Cluberti.

I got the same error message again:-

Couldn't access vxp1:

Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password.

It returned the error pretty quick. I powered off the virtual machine and repeated it - the command waited a good while before timing out, indicating that the machine can be seen by psexec. I tried different account/password, being logged in/logged out etc.

Maybe its time to use a different remote exec tool?

Anyone else have success in a similar scenario? Physical XP box logged on as domain user. Running VMWare with a bridged virtual XP machine. Virtual XP machine is not on domain (not allowed to add it), only has its own local accounts.

Thanks for reading.

Are you sure you have the right username and password? Can you map a drive to the VM using that IP address, and that username and password?

Does psexec work if you specify HOSTNAME\admin as the username?

Sussed it. Needed to turn off simple file sharing.

.