Thursday, May 7, 2009

Strange NetBIOS Share Browsing Issue

We encountered a pretty interesting issue the other day....

The desktop (Windows XP Pro) could see domain member computers and shares and could open up the main file server and view the shares but when opening them it would say that the shares couldn't be found. We could, however, access them by using the FQDN.

Now this client used to have a single Server 2003 machine running AD, WINS, DNS, Exchange, etc. When we came in we moved to discrete servers for all the services and extracted all the old AD roles from the old server and decommissioned it. Turns out the old server still had the DNS role running and registered in AD. As a result, when it was finally shut off a few days ago, it was the primary WINS server. We've now removed its entries from AD and DNS, als went to the properties for the DNS and chose the WINS tab. Lo and behold, there it was listed as the WINS server. We removed it and all is well!

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