Question:
I’m trying to get the PDC name for a domain on my network using the following code. It works fine within the VB IDE, but the moment I compile it and run it as an executable, it errors out with either

NERR_DCNotFound(2453): Could not find domain controller for this domain

or

ERROR_BAD_NETPATH(53): The network path was not found

Any idea what’s going wrong?

Here’s my code:

Private Declare Function NetGetDCName Lib "NETAPI32.DLL" _   (ServerName As Byte, DomainName As Byte, DCName As Long) As LongPrivate Declare Function lstrcpyW Lib _"kernel32.dll" (bRet As Byte, ByVal _lPtr As Long) As LongPrivate Declare Function NetApiBufferFree Lib _"Netapi32" (ByVal pBuffer As Long) As LongPublic Function GetPrimaryDCName(ByVal DName As String) As StringDim DCName As String, DCNPtr As LongDim DNArray() As Byte, DCNArray(100) As ByteDim result As LongDNArray = DName & vbNullCharresult = NetGetDCName(0&, DNArray(0), DCNPtr)If result <> 0 Then  Err.Raise vbObjectError + 4000, "CNetworkInfo", result  Exit FunctionEnd If lstrcpyW DCNArray(0), DCNPtrresult = NetApiBufferFree(DCNPtr)DCName = DCNArray() GetPrimaryDCName = Left(DCName, InStr(DCName, Chr(0)) - 1)End Function

Answer:
That is very odd. I could not get your code to fail on a W2K machine, but it did fail as an executable under NT 4.0. I solved the problem by changing the declare as follows:

Private Declare Function NetGetDCName _   Lib "NETAPI32.DLL" _   (ServerName As Any, _    DomainName As Any, _    ppBuffer As Long) As Long