HookPeek Adapter Description
Shown As "Unknown"
On Windows XP

Symptoms

The HookPeek application may display the adapter vendor description as "Unknown" when running under Windows XP.

Cause

The description string returned by querying OID_GEN_VENDOR_DESCRIPTION is much longer on Windows XP (Beta 2) then on previous Windows versions. The vendor description includes not only the actual adapter's description, but additional concatenated information describing NDIS Intermediate drivers that may be layered above it.

In addition, the description string has a large number of space characters between the base adapter description and the additional information that has been concatenated with it. In the example that PCAUSA tested the vendor description string was 114 characters in length:

"Realtek 8139-series PCI NIC                     (Microsoft Packet Scheduler)"

Some spaces omitted for readability...

HookPeek versions prior to V5.00.13.50 use a fixed-length (80 characters) character buffer for the adapter vendor description. Since the new descriptions are too long for this buffer, "Unknown" is displayed by default.

Interim Fix

You can modify the size of the m_szAdapterDriverDescription field of the HookAdapter structure defined in the HookUtil.h header to provide a larger buffer for the description:

Is:

char  m_szAdapterDriverDescription[ 80 ];

Should be:

char  m_szAdapterDriverDescription[ _MAX_PATH ];

The fix to be provided to accommodate this bug may be different. The final fix may dynamically size and allocate memory for the vendor description string.

Not also that the new Windows XP description string is almost unreadable because of its excessive length. Code may be provided to remove excessive space characters to improve readability.

Status

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Last modified: December 31, 2007