Network Authentication when running exe from WMI

Question

I have a C# exe that needs to be run using WMI and access a network share. However, when I access the share I get an UnauthorizedAccessException. If I run the exe directly the s

Answer 1

I know you've sorted it by using PSEXEC, which is a fantastic program, but if you did want to go back to WMI, have you tried enabling the following in your ConnectionOptions:

• The flag EnablePrivileges
• setting the Impersonation to ImpersonationLevel.Impersonate

Which does the following:

Gets or sets a value indicating whether user privileges need to be enabled for the connection operation. This property should only be used when the operation performed requires a certain user privilege to be enabled (for example, a machine restart).

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.management.connectionoptions.enableprivileges.aspx

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Gets or sets the COM impersonation level to be used for operations in this connection.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.management.connectionoptions.impersonation.aspx

I think they should tell your WMI to actually allow the program to have the correct credentials and thus access your network share

Answer 2

You can write all you commands to batch file to the remote machine which includes net use (no need to use a drive letter) to do an authentication. Works fine that way. I am still working on an alternative.

Answer 3

WMI just uses impersonation when executing the remote process, which does not give you network access. If you are ok going outside managed code, you can just map a UNC path in the remote process WMI started using whatever credentials you want. Then, you have the network access you want. I use NetUseAdd and NetUseDel from netapi32.dll to map the UNC path. See http://pinvoke.net/ for details on the using the APIs.

Answer 4

Having followed the link suggested by Isalamon above (thanks) I followed Jestro's advice and have rewritten using psexec.exe (which can be downloaded from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553.aspx) instead of WMI. It feels like a bit of a kludge to do it this way, but it seems to work.

New code for anyone who is experiencing similar problems:

Process proc = new Process();
proc.StartInfo.FileName = "PsExec.exe";
proc.StartInfo.Arguments = string.Format("\\\\{0} -d -u {1}\\{2} -p {3} {4}",
                                         remoteHost,
                                         domain,
                                         username,
                                         password,
                                         commandLine);
proc.StartInfo.CreateNoWindow = true;
proc.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
proc.Start();