Question

I am trying to create a utility to defrag all machine on my network. I have had success using WMI’s Defrag and DefragAnalysis methods, however they are not compatible with Windows XP. This is a problem as we have some XP machines on the network.
I have been able to locally invoke the defrag.exe process on an XP machine to perform a defrag however I am having problem invoking it on remote machines. Below is my code which works locally, could someone please help me in making this work for remote machines on my network? I have tried using a bit of WMI to help out but as I am new to C# and WMI I haven’t had success, thanks!

ProcessStartInfo info = new ProcessStartInfo();
info.FileName = "defrag";
info.Arguments = volume + " -f";
info.UseShellExecute = false;
info.CreateNoWindow = true;
info.RedirectStandardOutput = true;

Process defrag = Process.Start(info);
defrag.PriorityClass = ProcessPriorityClass.BelowNormal;

while (!defrag.HasExited)
{
    System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000);
    Process[] procs = Process.GetProcessesByName("dfrgntfs");
    if (procs != null && procs.Length > 0)
    {
        procs[0].PriorityClass = ProcessPriorityClass.Idle;
        defrag.WaitForExit();
    }

    result = null;
    while(!defrag.StandardOutput.EndOfStream)
    {
        //get output and store results
    }

Answer 1

I would probably just use PsExec to run the command remotely. This should work for pretty much any Windows (NT) version.