Terminal Services: Get Client Name While Running As Administrator

Question

Under normal circumstances, a VB.NET application of mine can check the ClientName environmental variable to get the name of the workstation the user is connecting from.

So when WorkstationX RDPs into ServerA:

ComputerName=ServerA
ClientName=WorkstationX

That works fine.

If I right-click on the application and choose Run As Administrator, the ClientName variable is not set.

Does anyone know of a way of easily getting the workstation name of the client connected to the terminal server, even when the application is launched via "Run As Administrator"?

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 09 '09 at 02:22

4

If you don't want to deal with the P/Invoke business yourself, you can use Cassia, which wraps it for you:

New Cassia.TerminalServicesManager().CurrentSession.ClientName

answered Apr 09 '09 at 02:22

Dan Ports

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I installed a Cassia NuGet package and it is (still) much more reliable at returning the client name that the CLIENTNAME environment variable. – Guru Josh Dec 22 '21 at 12:44

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 14 '08 at 04:15

2

The terminal services API might be your answer. I use it in a VB.NET app to log off user sessions on a given server, and to retrieve the names of the workstations connected to those sessions. The code I have has a lot of p-invoke stuff and is rather unwieldy, but I can post it if you want.

answered Nov 14 '08 at 04:15

Chris Tybur

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I assumed I would need to use WTSQuerySessionInformation to get to the value of WTSClientName, but haven't found any clean examples of doing so yet. – Kevin Fairchild Nov 14 '08 at 13:54
Clean as in working and minimal use of sketchy calls using ported VB6 code ;) – Kevin Fairchild Dec 30 '08 at 15:25

Terminal Services: Get Client Name While Running As Administrator

2 Answers2