Error running device manager remotely "Make sure that this computer is on the network, has remote administration enabled, and is running the "Plug and Play" and "Remote Registry" services"

I thought I'd share my current device manager frustrations as it may help other developers or sysadmins.

When trying to access information about device manager classes on a remote machine I've run into a few issues on Windows Server 2012.

Using the Win32 API setup functions such as SetupDiGetClassDescriptionEx and SetupDiClassNameFromGuidEx passing a remote machine name would fail with an unknown error however would work locally.

The API documentation didn't show any errors.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff551058(v=vs.85).aspx

Strange. I thought I'd quickly double check running Device Manager against the remote Windows Server 2012 R2 machine and got the following error.

Error running device manager remotely "Make sure that this computer is on the network, has remote administration enabled, and is running the "Plug and Play" and "Remote Registry" services"




I then tried to access a Windows 2003 server from my Windows 8 machine (this is probably a bug in Windows Server 2012 R2 even though it's the RTM version).


It seems that Microsoft have performed some bad on-a-budget bit of field surgery on Device Manager and hacked out a lot of the RPC functionality that's used for remote access. However have then not bothered to tidy up after themselves (either in the device manager user interface or the API documentation).
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2781106

In summary it looks like device manager (tools and API) are not a local access only thing.


XIA Configuration Server
Windows Server Documentation



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