Unable to Debug host process

PowerShell Universal
1

I’ve got a service account that is local admin.
Whether i run the Universal.Server.exe as a service with this account or just kick off the executable by hand running with this account, i am unable to access through the enter-pshostprocess
I find the process id(in a separate admin powershell session running as the same account), try to enter with that and get:

Enter-PSHostProcess : The 'Measure-Object' command was found in the module 'Microsoft.PowerShell.Utility', but the
module could not be loaded. For more information, run 'Import-Module Microsoft.PowerShell.Utility'.
At line:1 char:1
+ Enter-PSHostProcess 4400
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : InvalidOperation: (Microsoft.Power...tProcessCommand:EnterPSHostProcessCommand) [Enter-P
   SHostProcess], RemoteException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : EnterPSHostProcessCannotPushRunspace,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.EnterPSHostProcessCommand

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This is on Windows Server 2019

2

You likely won’t want to debug the Universal.Server.exe directly. Universal spins out separate PowerShell or PWSH processes for the various features of the platform.

What are you trying to debug? A dashboard?

3

In this particular case i’m trying to look at the $user object returned by my OIDC in the ‘authorization’ scripts. I’m following this guide which calls out:

Authentication and authorization scripts run within the Universal server. You can find the Universal.Server.exe process and attach to that.

https://docs.ironmansoftware.com/debugging/debugging-scripts#executing-your-script

4

Ah, duh. Yeah I gotcha. My fault.

If you just want to see the value of that variable, you could output it to a temp file:

$User | ConvertTo-Json | Out-File "$env:temp\user.txt"

I’m not 100% sure why this error is happening but have you tried to connect via a pwsh.exe (PS7) instance rather than Windows PowerShell?

1 Like
5

Same message on pwsh (v7).

I wonder if the ‘closed’ message on this issue from the powershell github is similar?