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I have a standard Windows 2012 R2 box setup with server core. I have the file server roles installed along with DFSR. I want to use the powershell tools like Get-DfsrState and other Get-Dfsr* to examine the health of my system.

This tool is present on one of the systems I have setup with a full GUI. But it isn't clear to me what I need to install it. A quick search of available Windows features shows that I have one DFS related feature not installed on the core server that is present on the full GUI system (i.e. RSAT-DFS-Mgmt-Con). Am I correct in assuming this module comes as part of this feature? Unfortunately, when I try to add this feature using server manager from a remote system Windows tells me that it is going to install the full GUI?!

> Get-WindowsFeature | ? {$_.Name -like '*dfs*'}

Display Name                             Name               Install State
------------                             ----               -------------
        [X] DFS Namespaces               FS-DFS-Namespace       Installed
        [X] DFS Replication              FS-DFS-Replication     Installed
            [ ] DFS Management Tools     RSAT-DFS-Mgmt-Con        Removed

Am I missing something? Do I really have to have a full GUI to use this command?

I guess I run this on a full desktop system and use the -ComputerName option, but I was hoping to setup nagios to monitor the output of various systems with NRPE.

Zoredache
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2 Answers2

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Although I don't have a resolution for you, I did spot a couple of people with the same problem and no resolution. See last comment on this thread and comment by 'regexaurus' here.

It wouldn't surprise me if this is "by design" in the sense that there may be some sort of dependency that was difficult to break from a software engineering point of view within the time constraints for release. The huge amount of work required to identify and break the spider's web of inter-dependencies within the Windows code-base to allow more modularisation (particularly separating out the GUI layer) is something that's been ongoing for years.

If the add role/feature wizards says it's a dependency, I can't see what you could do to get round it.

dbr
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you need to install the DFS management tools to be able to use the DFSR powershell module. If you don't want to install the GUI, you need to have the feature installed on a different system that does have the GUI installed, and use the -ComputerName switch with any cmdlet that you're wanting to use within the module. So your last comment is correct.

Tom
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