Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Network Discovery Windows 7

At some point in the recent past I noticed that I could not browse the local network.
I had recently upgraded to SBS 2011 after the upgrade I was able to browse the network but not now.
I could still access all of the resources on the network, so it was not a permission problem.
Network Discovery was turned on in the Advanced Sharing Settings of all of the Windows 7 computers.

After googling and bingleing many people wrote that they turned on the Computer Browser service.
However in Windows 7 and Server 2008, the browser service is deprecated and no longer used.
Dom's Techie Blog pointed to the services that need to be running for Network Discovery to work.
All of mine were set to the correct settings and running except that Function Discovery Resource Publication was set to manual and not running. Everything I could find stated that it should be set to manual.

On a hunch I started the Function Discovery Resource Publication service on a few computers and I was able to browse to them on the network almost instantly. I am not sure why I am not able to browse with the services set to default but I created a new Global Policy to set the service to Automatic and applied it to all of the computers in the domain.

I can now browse all of the computers but I still do not have a valid cause for what happened. I am going to try to research this one some more and see what happens.

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