I've been looking for answers and couldn't quite find anything that worked for me, hopefully there's someone who can help me out with this.
I need to get the number of entries in the DNS cache of the computer. Not really even interested in the particular entries, just the total count.
This answer (Is there a way to monitor the system's DNS cache on c#?) comes close but I can't manage to download the powershell module to try to get it to work, plus it would be best if I could get a solution that worked without requiring any extra tools to be installed.
Thanks in advance.
I have managed to do it by using the PowerShell Get-DnsClientCache function.
DnsClient functions are apparently loaded by default in the non-server Windows OSs as well, unlike the dnsserver module.
Anyone interested can see an example on how to execute PowerShell scripts in the link posted in the original question.
Related
Problem:
I have a PC with a bunch of network cards of the same type and two drivers that can service them. When I let Windows 7 decide which driver to load, each of them is loaded with the manufacturer's drivers, and for 3 out of 4 cards, that is the desired behaviour. But the last card needs to load a different driver than the others.
Manual solution:
This problem can be manually solved by going to the device manager, selecting "Update Driver" from the card's entry's context menu, choosing to list every available driver and then choosing the one that windows neglects (because the manufacturer's driver is signed, and mine isn't). To conduct this programmatically is the ultimate goal I pursue.
Tried approaches:
I already tried quite some things to solve this, but I still can't exactly solve the problem I am having.
The first idea was to disable the UPnP Service or similarly decline Windows' efforts to assign the drivers, but I can't because it is needed for the other cards, and the given circumstances dictate that the drivers will possibly have to be reassigned quite regularly.
I tried to use the DevCon tool, since it offers something that, at first glance, looks like an incredibly easy way to achieve my goal: A command line interface that is said to be as powerful as the device manager itself. From what the documentation says, it offers usable methods indeed, and I tried it thouroughly. But there seems to be a problem with identifying the card that I want to access uniquely. Using the DevCon Tool I can retrieve Device IDs of the following format:
PCI\VEN_XXXX&DEV_XXXX&SUBSYS_XXXXXXXX&REV_XX\X&XXXXXX&X&XXXX
This, sadly, does not help much. Until the second '\'-symbol, the IDs are the same for all four devices. I can use them to issue the commands that DevCon offers me (like listing compatibale hardware IDs or just finding them). But it seems that DevCon does not evaluate the part of the ID that follows the second '\', which means that I can not just disable one of the cards (I can indeed tell which of the cards is the one the driver of which I want to change, so no problem in that respect).
A very similar approach was to use the SetupDI Api of Windows. Actually, it is the exact API that the DevCon Tool uses (well, that's what they say, anyways). And while finding and identifying the device in questions is relatively easy (even for the C# person that I am, who never had to leave the managed world), I can not seem to find a way to do anything but enabling and disabling the device. I would most probably be able to construct a workaround if I had a way of removing the card (completely disassociate it with any driver), but I can't figure out how. Disabling the device is nice, but it preserves the driver association and therefore is not a help for me.
If you can help me refine my approaches or point me another route to try, please do so. Even if your answer does not solve my problem, your suggestion might hint me at approaches I have not yet tried, and I am desperate enough to try them all.
The exact problem can be solved using a combination of the setupapi.dll and newdev.dll. Note that the latter is only available on Win7 and later. Using the device and driver enumeration functions from the setupapi you can get handles to devices and appropriate drivers from the driver store. The newdev api then offers an install function that takes a device and a driver object (retrieved from the setupapis before) and install the specified driver on the device.
I've been looking for a proper way to get file associations working on WinXP and above. The association should be replaced if it already exists. The application I've developed always run in admin mode, so rights shouldn't be a problem.'
I've come across some old posts that had some sample code, but some of them didn't work well enough and some not at all. I'm using this post to make a final desicion on the method I will attempt to use and am looking for as much feedback as possible.
I think you need to make changes to the registry as shown here
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc144154%28v=vs.85%29.aspx#registration
Does anyone know how to clear out the Kerberos ticket cache on the local computer - using managed \ unmanaegd code?
Thanks in advance!
I believe you need to do a call to LsaCallAuthenticationPackage using KERB_PURGE_TKT_CACHE_REQUEST after using either LsaConnectUntrusted or LsaRegisterLogonProcess. Sorry no specifics, but I don't have my code for this around...
The most simple way is to take the source code of Microsoft's KList (Included in the platform SDK\ Samples), and to do like them...
There is a "managed C#" example of purging kerberos tickets using pInvoke at https://github.com/ErtiEelmaa/StackOverflow/blob/master/GroupPolicyUtilities.cs
Way too long to copy/paste here. It took some time since structures in pInvoke were invalid(eg someone though C++ LONG is equal to C# LONG and yada-yada), however, I've tested this one, and it worked for me.
Also, I noticed that the Windows server 2003 klist.c has few bugs in PurgeTicket:
it does not clean up the response
it double-checks the same "RESULT", instead of checking "RESULT" and then "SUB-RESULT"
The simple, stupid way:
system("kdestroy");
Or if you want to be more legit, just check out the source of a kdestroy implementation. krb5_cc_destroy() seems to be the relevant function call.
Is it possible for a .NET application to leave a trace so that it can be found if the application is re-installed?
Of course, a trace that is difficult to be removed.
Create a file
Create a registry key
Create a global variable
A combination of all above
...and then check for existence the next time install is attempted.
While it is better practice to remove applications in their entirety, I assume this is for 'trial' software (one time install) purposes or a similar reason.
Well, generally, if you un-install something, you'd hope it completely removes itself, and doesn't leave a trace of the fact that it was there. Otherwise, if it doesn't, it hasn't really un-installed.
This is language-agnostic anyway.
So the answer is: Yes, but don't do that.
What problem are you really trying to solve?
Many application leave behind traces (eg in registry) to detect previous installation. However tools like RevoUninstaller can be used to completely remove those traces. One easy way of doing so is to send the machine id to your server.
I've done some Googling to find better information (with no success) but I can remember mention of something referred to as the "Manufacturers Section" of a hard drive, an area which is outside that of normal storage to which it's possible to write information that won't be lost if the drive is re-formatted. The specific product I'm remembering was AutoCAD.
The fact that you are asking for something that is "difficult to be removed" leads me to believe that you are looking for something like this?
It's unlikely that the use of this sort of technology would make you very popular with your customers, particularly with the bad feeling directed towards DRM, rootkits and the like.
Anyone know where a computer keeps what parameters it can accept through this function? For example, I'd like to know what I can send to Winword.exe (Microsoft Word). Or is there an online list of what programs work here?
There's no standard means to query available command line parameters in executables. That's why you have to look online for published lists. For example Microsoft Word.
The Process.Start(..) overloaded methods pass various data into the process but cannot extract it because of the proprietary nature how a Process uses this info.
If you started the processes then Process.StartInfo may provide some useful information about how it was started (but does not reflect possibilities), and won't work as intended if you're just grabbing a process from memory that you didn't start.
Although it's customary for many Windows processes to allow /? to produce a list of parameters, and many systems use -help, /help or --help, etc, the output of even those may differ and be tough to consistently parse for discovery purposes.
Here is a list of accepted arguments for winword.exe Args list.
The command line arguments that an application accepts isn't stored anywhere on your hard drive, unless if there's specific documentation that came along with that product. That being said, google will be your best friend for this. Any app you think can be launched from the command line using different parameters, will have some info on the net.
you can either go to your application's help and find it there, or you can ask good old mr. Google to help you. if you are looking for Windows Word's args list, you can search for it on the support page of Microsoft. I believe there might be some changes from version to version.
Unix has a built-in documentation system for this: man pages. This is just one feature of Unix based OSs that shows how programmer-oriented it is (not a bad thing). Another would be the profileration of packaging and dependency systems.
Alas, no such standard exists for Windows.