Back in 1988, Rambo III was set to be a blockbuster and Frank Stallone sung the end title theme “He ain’t heavy…”.
Nowadays, Afghanistan turned to be another new kind of battled field and I’ve recently been surprise by a side-effect of upgrading Active Directory to 2008. A customer of mine, like John Rambo, shot first and (optionally if thing got messed up) thought afterwards then asked for rescue (not by helicopter hopefully for me).
The problem was simple: the browse-list (also incorrectly called network neighborhood by the end-users) was almost empty while before upgrading, it was still full of dozens of computers. The reason was simple, although a little unexpected (who said undocumented?): The “computer browser” service on the DC holding the PDC Emulator FSMO role was set to disabled and therefore stopped. Restarting it solved the issue (with a little patience due to propagation) but one question remained: why was it stopped and configured so? I deeply inspected group policies applied to DC but remained clueless. By reproducing the operation in a test environment, it appeared that the upgrade process intentionally stops and sets to disable the browser service, as simple as that but… Not documented as far as I knew until I found this blog post telling the whole story: http://blogs.technet.com/networking/archive/2008/07/25/netbios-browsing-across-subnets-may-fail-after-upgrading-to-windows-server-2008.aspx
For more information about the browser services, John Rambo and that song, go there:
http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/43dce7f8-0741-4672-a7e3-762671110e9f1033.mspx?mfr=true
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/188001
http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/b4bf5ea0-f68d-403a-9194-2612f676d6c91033.mspx?mfr=true
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095956/
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=QOTLpQWloXE
And cut!
(And remember: God would have mercy, John Rambo won't!)