Computers unreachable or offline
Douglas Allison
HI everyone,
I am a new customer, and so far things are going great. I am having issues scanning some of my workstations. All are domain joined, controlled by GPO. I am mostly Windows 7 64-bit SP1, and that OS is the only one I am having issues with. I can access the C$ and ADMIN$ shares. I cannot access an IPC$ share, but I cannot do that on machines that are working correctly either.
Firewall is controlled via GPO, so all machines are the same. machines are all the same model as well. I am able to successfully scan and deploy to all others with the credentials I created.
.net framework on all is 4.6
I have the same issue whether I scan from the central server, or remotely from my workstation (client).
Any suggestions?
- Doug
0
Comments
Have you tried the Remote Repair utility? Help --> Remote Repair.
Try this command on the affected computers (run in CMD as admin)
netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="Network Discovery" new enable=Yes
Hi Colby,
Yes, remote repair says all is ok. I then scan the workstation, and it is not able to connect (same error).
Hi Selfman,
I issued the suggested command, which says it updated 48 rules and the error is now gone for that workstation. I'll need to look at my firewall rules, since all is supposed to be set in a GPO.
Thank you both for your help.
- Doug
I would suggest checking on your Group Policy settings on a troublesome workstation.
In the Event Viewer if any policies are failing to be applied you can see the errors in the logs.
Similarly, from a command prompt you can run a gpresult /r to list out a report of what Group Policy Objects have been applied to that workstation. Typically if something isn't being applied that should be, a gpupdate /force will resolve the issue.
If you want some real "meat and taters" data to look at, you can run gpresult /H C;\somepath\result.htm and then open the resulting html document to review the settings being applied to a client. Again, gpupdate /force will resolve (typically) any discrepencies.
ANOTHER great tool to use, and a graphical one at that, is RSoP. Open up command prompt and type rsop. You'll get a window similar to Group Policy Editor that you can drill down through. It'll only have stuff inside of it that has been applied to the workstation, so you won't see all the other 150,000 settings you don't want/care to see.
I'd much rather you verify your group policy before you go mucking about with a firewall rule via a command or something otherwise. Group Policy has been the fix for me several times over the course of having the software.
The rules applied while the command is executed are the same as when you have a new computer, open the network neighbourhood and click on the yellow bar "Enable network discovery".
Like this one https://i.stack.imgur.com/tQbhl.png
This is pretty much you have to do if you want to manage the computer remotely. You have to enable filesharing, otherwise the administrative shares C$, D$, IPC$, ADMIN$ wont be available.
Network was indeed my issue on selected workstations. It doesn't look like it's controlled via GPO after all. Thank you all for your help!
- Doug
This should help you make sure you are good to go for the future. Definitely set this up in Group Policy so it can be set and forgotten about :)
https://documentation.pdq.com/PDQDeploy/13.3.0.0/windows-firewall.htm
Had this issue and everything checked out with admin$ share and all. Finally, I when into the network adapter to see if “File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks” was checked and it was.
I UNCHECKED it and RECHECKED it and ok’ed it and all was fine after that.
Hope this helps someone.
I know this is an old thread, but I've recently come across the same issue with a few machines in my environment. Running sfc /scannow did the trick for me. dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth if that doesn't work. Last but not least, with Win10 you can update to the latest version via USB which will clear any remaining corruption (as of this writing it is 1803 to 1809).