Question

Our support team has diagnosed some specific areas of a computer’s configuration that may cause slowness in our Network-based database application. I have been tasked with creating a tool to test for possible slowing concerns. I am having problems detecting if Linked Layer Topology is enabled in Windows for their active network adapter. I have a method for finding the active (most used) network adapter.

Is there a way to detect Linked Layer Topology and how do I test for it?

Answer 1

Not a pure .Net solution, but seems to work. Function accepts the name of the local area connection and a protocol name. I have a link to a site that has a lot of different protocol driver names, but the ones you want are included in the code.

This uses nvspbind.exe, which you can get from http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/nvspbind.

CODE

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        //check Link-Layer Topology Discover Mapper I/O Driver
        bool result1 = IsProtocalEnabled("Local Area Connection", "ms_lltdio");
        //check Link-Layer Topology Discovery Responder
        bool result2 = IsProtocalEnabled("Local Area Connection", "ms_rspndr");
    }

    private static bool IsProtocalEnabled(string adapter, string protocol)
    {
        var p = new System.Diagnostics.Process();
        p.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
        p.StartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
        p.StartInfo.FileName = System.IO.Path.Combine(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory, "nvspbind.exe");
        p.StartInfo.Arguments = string.Format("/o \"{0}\" {1}", adapter, protocol);

        p.Start();

        string output = p.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd();

        p.WaitForExit();

        return output.Contains("enabled");
    }
}

I got the protocol driver names from here: http://djseppie.wordpress.com/category/windows/scripting/