Here's an attempt.

The following function will return whether or not a user belongs to a particular user group (in my case `"Administrators"`) on any machine.  


```vb
Imports System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement

Public Shared Function IsMemberOfGroup(userName As String, machineName As String, memberGroup as String) As Boolean
    Dim isMember As Boolean = False
    Using rootContext As New PrincipalContext(ContextType.Machine, machineName), _
          grp As GroupPrincipal = GroupPrincipal.FindByIdentity(rootContext, memberGroup), _
          usr As UserPrincipal = UserPrincipal.FindByIdentity(rootContext, IdentityType.SamAccountName, userName)
        If grp IsNot Nothing AndAlso usr IsNot Nothing Then
            ' Check if the user is a member of the group.
            isMember = grp.GetMembers(True).Contains(usr)
        Else
            isMember = False
        End If
    End Using
    Return isMember
End Function

```

The caveat is that the user running the method has to be an admin in order to have rights to this information set in `PrincipalContext`.  I was hoping that the application would be able to determine if the user running the application is an admin.  

The only way to make this super helpful is to call it and see if it came up with "Access Denied", similar to [hometoast](https://stackoverflow.com/users/2009/hometoast) already suggested, but this still doesn't feel super "clean"

I'm writing an app that aggregates all the event log entries on each of several different servers.  I can get the event logs by passing in the `MachineName` to `EventLog.GetEventLogs`.  This will typically fail at some stage is the user is not a local administrator on that machine, so I'd like to check for it ahead of time and skip to the next set of servers if that is the case




    For Each svr As String In Servers

        'TODO: check to see if they are a local administrator, else continue for
		
        Dim logs As List(Of EventLog) = EventLog.GetEventLogs(svr).ToList
        For Each log As EventLog In logs
            LoadEachOSLogEntry(log)
        Next
    Next


Most solutions, like the one [here](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1089046/in-net-c-test-if-user-is-an-administrative-user), only check if the user is an admin on the currently executing machine.





    Dim user As WindowsIdentity = WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent()
    Dim principal As New WindowsPrincipal(user)
    Dim isAdmin As Boolean = principal.IsInRole(WindowsBuiltInRole.Administrator)

Check if user is a local admin on external machine

I'm trying to figure out if a user has admin rights on a particular server by calling the following code:



    Dim serverContext As New PrincipalContext(ContextType.Machine, myServerName)

If they don't, the `ConnectedServer` property on the `PrincipleContext` object turns into type `System.UnathorizedAccessException` and the value is `{"Access is denied."}`

But I can't seem to run any check in code to see if this is the case or not or wether the connected server property set normally as a string.  

These won't work, and I can't figure out why




    Dim bln1 = serverContext.ConnectedServer = "Access is denied."
    Dim bln2 = TypeOf serverContext.ConnectedServer Is System.UnauthorizedAccessException

![enter image description here][1]


  [1]: http://i.stack.imgur.com/qdmkd.png