So I am getting ready to do a major infrastructure upgrade at work, and am in the process of building all the new servers as VMs. As much as possible, I am trying to run them in core (GUI-less) mode to save on resources, present less surface area, etc. This had cause me a fair bit of frustration though, since I am not as familiar with all the powershell cmdlets as I want to be, and frankly, documentation for server 2016 is a bit sparse at the moment for a few of the things I want to do.

The real issue though, was when it comes to troubleshooting problems. I am used to just popping into event viewer and going through the logs, but on core, you either have to use powershell, or do it remotely. What they don’t tell you is that you need to do a few things before that is allowed in a default install. Otherwise, you just get a generic can’t connect style message. The commands you need are:

Thanks to Brian Cryer, and his post here for the solution.