I’m a huge fan of remotely diagnosing computer issues. If I tell a remote VPN user to bring in their equipment that means there is something terribly wrong with their system.
I was attempting to use systeminfo /s IPOFCOMPUTER to check the hotfixes that had been applied and verify the network wasn’t causing issues.
Loading Network Card Information …ERROR: Provider failure
Awesome.
Another site told me to delete the wbem/repository files as they were probably corrupt. WMI requires these files.
In order to delete them, you must turn off the WMI Service (Windows Management Instrumentation), but I was having difficulty stopping the service remotely via my services.msc connected to their system.
So I fired up psexec and ran the command lines:
psexec -s \\computerIP cmd.exe
net stop "windows management instrumentation"
I then deleted the files located in:
C:\windows\system32\wbem\Repository
Then start up the WMI:
net start "windows management instrumentation"
Now I could re-run the systeminfo /s systemnameorip and it worked like magic.