OS information on a remote host

[dne]

Hi,

Does anyone know how to get the OS information on a remote host without using WMI?

I'm interested in knowing the name of the operating system, the service pack & hotfix installed on a remote host. I tried to look on the registry but it doesn't seem to provide enough information. Maybe I didn't look at the right one?

Thanks in advance!

-dne

[Mick]

try NetWkstaGetInfo(...) for OS ver, service pack/hotfix woudl be a walk through the registy, but those locations and values may and can change, so I do not understand your reluctance to use WMI as it encapsulates your need to know the specifics and is designed with network management in mind (CIM, SNMPv2 etc)....

[dne]

Thanks for your reply. The reason I don't want to use WMI is because I have encountered several machines that have corrupted WMI classes. As a result, I wasn't able to query the information that I needed using WMI.

[Mick]

Originally posted by dne
Thanks for your reply. The reason I don't want to use WMI is because I have encountered several machines that have corrupted WMI classes. As a result, I wasn't able to query the information that I needed using WMI.

What are the OS's involved, what do you mean by corrupt? Which classes where you trying to query?

You see, solving this issue, is the easiest route for you, as you would have to write your own custom solution, whereas, instead of building on that solution or constiantly modifying your code for new registry key locations, will and can become a maintanence nightmare. WMI/CIM is intended to be an ease of use for system management, like SNMP before hand (and still) it provides extensions though for the windows enviroment and a common model CIM for such.

You could easily write a client/server model using sockets to stream the version/service pack/hotfix data back and forth, but then when you want to add more system management/information retrival (bRaZiL!!! -don't mind this comment-) then we go back to ease of use and WMI.