WMI client (WMIC) for Linux

October 12 2011, by Simon Krenger

One excellent tool for Systems Management on Windows is the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), which allows you to remotely execute commands and query parameters on a Windows Host. Of course, all modern Windows systems have the WMI Client installed, but what about the Linux clients?

To get the same functionality on a Linux system (I am using Debian in this example), we need to get the following two packages from this website:

• libwmiclient1_1.3.14-3_amd64.deb
• wmi-client_1.3.14-3_amd64.deb

Make sure you get the correct packages for your architecture and Linux distribution. Then install these two packages like so:
root@qcore:~# dpkg -i libwmiclient1_1.3.14-3_amd64.deb
root@qcore:~# dpkg -i wmi-client_1.3.14-3_amd64.deb
Now we are ready to go. The following example shows how to get the size of the WorkingSet of the process “java.exe” running on the remote host 192.168.20.20:
wmic -U Administrator%mysecret //192.168.20.20 "Select WorkingSetSize from Win32_Process Where CommandLine like '%java.exe%'"
Update: I added a set of examples here.

I really like the SQL-like syntax (they call it WQL) and the fact that you can query virtually any parameter of a Windows host. In the future, I might create another post with my Nagios scripts that use WMI for monitoring. For other examples and the documentation of WMI, refer to the corresponding Microsoft TechNet site.