PC Name

markfc

Hi There,

I wonder if anyone could come up with an answer for me to this... I know it's not strictly PHP but everyone here is so helpful.

I'm writing a helpdesk program and basically I have a php form, for people to log there calls on and one of the fields is PCNAME

I want this to populate itself witht he machine name of the person logging the call. I realise php won't do this for me, but can anyone thing of another way of doing this?

I can get the ipaddress of the machine but i would really love the machine name.

Cheers

Mark!

AstroTeg

The machine name (as in the WINS name) is not available to the browser. With ActiveX you may have a chance to grab the machine name, but it would be an IE PC only solution.

Erkilite

if you machines were only win32, you could use a win32 api call.

I read an article in (i think) PHP|a about accessing the win32 api from php.

php has a library to do this.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.w32api.php

not sure what call to use or if it will work, maybe ask on a .net programing forum.

they may have to be on the same network, etc...

AstroTeg

Originally posted by Erkilite
if you machines were only win32, you could use a win32 api call.

...

This would get the name of the web server if the web server was a Windows box. But he wants the names of the clients coming to his web server. In that case, PHP is not client side and has no ability to run the DLLs on the client.

dave420

I use this method at work, for returning the netbios name of the remote machine:

Get the output of the nbtstat -A 1.2.3.4 command (obviously replacing 1.2.3.4 with $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]. It'll work on any machine that has netbios running (so pretty much any machine on a local network, except macs :-P)

nbtstat gives you basic information about a netbios computer, such as its name, the currently logged-on user, and domain/workgroup. If you want more in-depth information, check out "psloggedon.exe" from www.sysinternals.com. They have lots more tools which can very easily be used from within PHP, giving you an incredible level of network-awareness 🙂