How do you find out the difference between workstations and servers on the network?

Question

I know how to get the machines on a server using the System.DirectoryServices network. The issue is that I would like to ignore workstations/computers on the network and only retrieve servers.

In case someone says to check the OS version, the problem with getting a Win NT family OS version number is that each number may correspond to both a server and non-server OS (such as NT version 6.1 referring both to Win 7 and Win Server 2008 R2).

Here is my basic test class:

namespace Project1
{
    class Class1
    {
        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
             List<string> list = Class1.GetComputersOnNetwork();           
        }

        public static List<string> GetComputersOnNetwork()
        {
            string fileName = "networkcomputers.txt";  

            // Delete the file if it exists.
            if (System.IO.File.Exists(fileName))
            {
                System.IO.File.Delete(fileName);
            }

            // Create the file.
            System.IO.FileStream fs = System.IO.File.Create(fileName, 1024);

            StreamWriter strwr = new StreamWriter(fs);

            int i = 0;
            List<string> list = new List<string>();
            DirectoryEntry root = new DirectoryEntry("WinNT:");           
            foreach (DirectoryEntry computers in root.Children)
            {                   
                if ((computers.Name != "Schema"))
                {
                    i++;
                    Console.WriteLine("Machine Number " + i + ": " + computers.Name);
                    strwr.WriteLine("Machine Number " + i + ": " + computers.Name);
                    list.Add(computers.Name);
                }           
            }
            return list;
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

Instead of going at the operatingSystemVersion property, look at the operatingSystem property. That'll give you the name of the SKU. You'll need to know which are server OS versions and which aren't - there's no IsServer boolean. Depending on how they're named, you may be able to do a wildcard search on operatingSystemVersion to find computers that have a operatingSystemVersion that contains the string "server".