Re: [dmidecode] dmidecode on Windows - different results for different users?

[Tomasz Chmielewski]

Jean Delvare schrieb:
> Hi Tomasz,
>
> On Tue, 20 May 2008 13:16:43 +0200, Tomasz Chmielewski wrote:
> > Tomasz Chmielewski schrieb:
> >
> > > Basically, dmidecode is confusing "System Information" with "Base Board 
> > > Information" when started as SYSTEM.
>
> I am not familiar with special Windows users. What is the role of the
> "system" user? I tried to create such a user but I see no appropriate
> role for him.

SYSTEM is a built-in account which has administrative privileges. It is 
used to run some of the Windows services and some tasks which are 
executed automatically by the operating system. You can't create or 
remove this account.

Under Linux, this would be root, with a difference, that you can also 
easily log in as root, whereas you can't log in as SYSTEM (at least 
obviously - more on that later).


> On my system, only the administrator can read /dev/mem, so I cannot
> compare the output of dmidecode with another user. I compared between
> administrator on Windows and root on Linux and the output of dmidecode
> is the same.

To use a SYSTEM account - as an Administrator, run in cmd.exe window:

at 12:05 /interactive cmd.exe

(where your current time is ~12:03).

It will start another cmd.exe window at 12:05 - started by a SYSTEM account.

There, you can start dmidecode, and compare dmidecode output with the 
one started by Administrator.


> > I didn't mention one important information: I used Windows 2000 SP4.
> >
> > I made a quick test on Windows XP SP2, and it shows proper behaviour 
> > (output is the same and does not depent on user).
>
> Was it on the same machine? I suspect that different BIOS could lead to
> different results.

Yeah, indeed it was a different machine.


> > So it looks like dmidecode doesn't like Windows 2000.
>
> dmidecode simply reads the raw data from /dev/mem, which itself is implemented
> by cygwin in terms of Windows system calls as I understand it. Apparently, on
> your system, Windows is exposing different data depending on who is asking.
> There's nothing I can do about it in dmidecode. If there's any way to address
> the problem, that would be something for the cygwin folks to investigate.


--
Tomasz Chmielewski
http://wpkg.org