Simon Krenger

Some years ago, I wrote some examples for the WMI client on Linux. I still get a lot of queries from people trying to use the WMI client to access Windows hosts and I am often happy to help if there are any problems.

One of the latest problems occurred when trying to access a Windows host over IPv6:

$ wmic -U 'user%password' //FD00:180::0:0:0:0:0 "Select Caption From Win32_OperatingSystem" [..] UNKNOWN - The WMI query had problems. The error text from wmic is: [librpc/rpc/dcerpc_util.c:343:dcerpc_parse_binding()] Unknown dcerpc transport 'FD00' [librpc/rpc/dcerpc_connect.c:337:dcerpc_pipe_connect_ncacn_ip_tcp_recv()] failed NT status (c0000017) in dcerpc_pipe_connect_ncacn_ip_tcp_recv [librpc/rpc/dcerpc_connect.c:828:dcerpc_pipe_connect_b_recv()] failed NT status (c0000017) in dcerpc_pipe_connect_b_recv [wmi/wmic.c:196:main()] ERROR: Login to remote object. NTSTATUS: NT_STATUS_NO_MEMORY - Memory allocation error

This was quite a funny problem, because the same query seemed to work when accessing the host over IPv4. So we quickly suspected that the WMI client does not support IPv6. By looking at the underlying Samba code (e.g. dcerpc_util.c and binding.c), I guessed that this seems to be a parsing issue of some kind.

Anyway, as a workaround, it is possible to access Windows hosts over IPv6 when using the DNS name instead of the IPv6 address. After replacing the IPv6 address with the DNS hostname, the query will work as expected:

$ wmic -U 'user%password' //ipv6vm "Select Caption From Win32_OperatingSystem" 

CLASS: Win32_ComputerSystem[..]