Long running (>8hours) process via winRM is terminated at 8 hours.

Question

Is there a way to change the MaxShellRuntime setting in WinRM 2 & 3?

according to the docs, this is now a read only value since WinRM 2

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winrm/installation-and-configuration-for-windows-remote-management#maxshellruntime

but we have many long running data import processes that we need to trigger remotely and these can easily take longer than 8 hours.

on our legacy servers (despite running WinRM 2 or 3), this doesn't seem to be an issue - I suspect these were originally WinRM 1 and updates have not overwritten the extended values.

I'm guessing (hoping) that there might be a registry hack that will allow us to change the value ?

these legacy on-prem servers are being migrated to the cloud and as each new machine is created, we are stuck with the 8hour time out.

any pointers would be appreciated.

Phil

Answer 1

Not sure if this will help you or not, but what do you get when you run this command?

winrm get winrm/config/Winrs

On Win10 I see "MaxShellRunTime = 2147483647". The site you referred to says the default is 28800000 which is 8 hours. Does your system show 28800000?

I found registry entries at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WSMAN\WinRS but MaxShellRunTime is not there.

I also tried to update the value, but winrm complained that it was a deprecated setting. You could try that.

winrm set winrm/config/WinRs @{MaxShellRunTime="2147483647"}

Answer 2

From my Win10 Home laptop I was able to run a 9 hour Invoke-Command against my Win10 Pro VM. Try using a PSSession-Option.

 $User = ".\admin"
 $PWord = ConvertTo-SecureString -String "admin" -AsPlainText -Force
 $Credential = New-Object -TypeName System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -ArgumentList $User, $PWord
 $sec = (60 * 60) * 9

 $opts = New-PSSessionOption -IdleTimeout 99999 -OperationTimeout 99999 

 Get-Date
 Invoke-Command -ComputerName "test10" -credential $Credential -ScriptBlock {start-sleep -Seconds $using:sec} -SessionOption $opts
 Get-Date