The following situation:

We have Windows XP Embedded clients that have all admin shares disabled and only have read-only shares (for security reasons).

What we want to do is run remote shell (dos) commands on these machines. At first we looked at PsExec & BeyondExec applications (and all sorts of variants), but all of them rely on having at least an admin$ share, which are disabled on our systems.

Telnet is not secure enough, as is RSHD servers.

So we looked at the next obvious solution: and SSH server.

We also prefer an open-source or freeware solution that is still maintained. I looked at freeSSH server for Windows, but that didn't run stable, I tried installing copSSH, WinSSH & openSSH for Windows, but none of these applications seem to work on Windows XP Embedded. The services can either not be installed or cannot be started. I don't know why. Some kind of dependency that is missing.

So are there any other solutions out there? I don't care about having to an agent installation locally of some kind on each system, as long as the size of the software is small enough.

Can someone suggest some alternatives to what I've already mentioned? Thank you very much.