Group Policy & Netbios

[PreviousPoster]

Dear All,

I'm not sure whether this is the correct place to post this question but I'll found out soon enough

I have a technical issue which I need to resolve ASAP, basically Netbios is not working on the network, I need to check my ISA settings, I think the NIC may have Netbios disabled and isn't allowing it through, or maybe there is a firewall rule in place I need to check but either way, Netbios isn't running from the Internal Network across to the Services Network which is where my DC's are located.

My users can logon to the domain fine, and can access the servers fine via DNS but for some reason, it appears that the group policy isn't working, and before I start troubleshooting using DCDIAG and Netdiag and things like that, I just thought I would ask the basic question, and that is whether Group Policy relies on Netbios or not? if it doesn't then I got some bigger issues I think

Any help / advice would be greatly appreciated

Kindest Regards

Musto

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Dear All,

I have just found this article:-

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/9e7595b5-4412-443c-9769-5ae91be0e2c51033.mspx?mfr=true

It says at the very top that if you turn of ICMP then group policy will fail, that is one of the things I have done, I have turned off ICMP or blocked ICMP from the Internal LAN to the services LAN for security purposes, well to try and stop students from trying to ping the network or scan the network.

Can anyone give me a good reason why I need ICMP or how group policy uses ICMP?

TA

[PreviousPoster]

Hi

First off, GPO doesn't have anything to do with Netbios. Maybe some settings in your GPO has but I don't know and in general Netbios has nothing to do with it.

About ICMP you must allow this traffic as group policy uses it to test if they have contact with a DC or not and some more things with slow link detection etc...
Read Scenario 2: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/910206/en-us
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/227260/en-us
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/179442/en-us

You need to turn on ICMP, otherwise you will never get it to work. But of course you can limit the ICMP-packages to the Domain Controllers and not to your other servers you might have...

[DennisT]

I can confirm that netbios isn't needed. We run a full NT2003 AD Native domain. We have no servers set up with WINS and netbios over TCPIP is turned off on all PCs and servers.

[PreviousPoster]

My company has a two word domain name. (I didn't do it.) It looks something like ABC.DEF for the domain. I found that my Group Policies were being stored in \\ABC.DEF\Sysvol\ABC.DEF\... I had a computer that was not able to resolve the domain. He could resolve \\ABC\Sysvol\ABC.DEF\... but not the double word version. So I looked at his TCPIP settings and noticed he didn't have NetBios via TCPIP enabled. As soon as I enabled this, then he could resolve \\ABC.DEF\Sysvol\ABC.DEF\...

Hope this helps.