Windows 2008 R2 Domain, Network Discovery

[MrWu]

Hi guys, don't know how I survive as an NM without Edugeek here :-)

 

We upgraded to a Windows 2008 R2 native (from 2003) a few weeks back, by intorducing two brand new Windows 2008 R2 servers

 

All going well.

 

Just yesterday (and we think things were working before) one of my techincians advised that he can't browse anything from his Impero client or server. I had a good tip from here that Impero uses Network Discovery to find PCs (which we know has been working a few days ago, since we were deploying machines.

 

On further analysis I noticed almost all my servers and machines running Win7 and Server 2008 show up little in Network places (now I am sure we did have more machines shown before,even after the domain level was raised) ie now shows just tsclient and a handful of desktops/servers

 

When browsing through an XP machine or 2003 server to network places I get error msg: domain is not accessible you might not permissions

 

Firewall domain policy is off, Win7, XP and 2003 can browse to named shares and drives with no ill effects.

 

Googling this I think it's a known problem (strange it has just cropped up now after a few weeks raising the domain level - I have also changed the Core switch with just basic wireless VLANs, but that is unlikely to effect the wired network like this.)

 

Google suggest turning Network Discovery on with the Windows 2008 R2 boxes with a few tweaks Enable Network Discovery Server 2008 R2 | Dom's Techie Blog - For all IT Problems! but would this tweak need to be made on every domain controller / server on the network? Would this issue effect all the machines and servers in my network too?

 

Also trying to find if a GPO was accidently activated on the domain to do this.

 

As always any suggestions most welcome.

 

Thanks

[SYNACK]

The Network discovery feature is turned off on all machines Vista and above by default as a security feature, you will need to turn it on both on the server and the clients, I'd switch the domain profile firewall back on too unless you want the first worm you encounter to destroy your entire network.

[MrWu]

Cheers Synack

 

You're right.

 

Also points to this too: NetBIOS browsing across subnets may fail after upgrading to Windows Server 2008 - Microsoft Enterprise Networking Team - Site Home - TechNet Blogs