MAchines not showing up in network places across BOVPN

Guru · 6 Oct 2011 at 15:16

Hi all,

Not sure if this is in the right section of the forums, but we've got a client who has a BOVPN connecting two offices in a windows 2003 environment. The BOVPN went down because of the BT issue the other day and now that it is back up the only thing that is not right at the moment is that in the network places in Site A they cannot see machine in Site B.

If we reboot the DC's (of which there are 3 in one site and one in the other) it will resolve the issue. But there MUST be a way to get this to show up without having to bounce servers left right and center?

Anyone have any ideas please?

Many Thanks,

G

Rangler · 7 Oct 2011 at 10:53

Dont work for a company in SLOUGH do you.?

Guru · 7 Oct 2011 at 11:22

No, why?

mr.bond · 7 Oct 2011 at 16:34

verify that your WINS service is not crashing on your WINS servers

Guru · 7 Oct 2011 at 17:20

The wins service looks ok, but there are lots of machines missing in wins. Am I right in thinking that all the machine need netbios enables for this to work or is that retired now?

Thanks,

G

mr.bond · 8 Oct 2011 at 10:34

NetBIOS traffic is not capable of being routed, you need WINS running to achieve cross-subnet browsing. NetBIOS is as old as the hills, but broswer based name resolution is still required for many applications, and the problem you've seen.
Point all clients (and servers) to either a central WINS server, or if you've multiple WINS server ensure they're replicating, this will more than likely solve your problems.