jason404 I have a remote Windows 2008 R2 Server Core server on Amazon EC2, connected to my LAN through an OpenVPN connection. I have allowed Network Discovery through the Windows firewall and NetBIOS is enabled in the OpenVPN interface. I have set the WINS server for the OpenVPN interface to the WINS server on my LAN and it appears in the WINS registrations, so everything looks fine. However, the server does not appear in Network. Does WINS name resolution not work through OpenVPN?
krzee yes, wins is just ip traffic, so no problem there. netbios on the other hand... thats layer2, and irrelevant if you have WINS. did you tell openvpn to set the wins server? push "dhcp-option WINS 1.2.3.4"
jason404 Thanks for your reply. I disabled NetBIOS as it is a Layer 2 protocol and I added the configuration you mentioned. However, it hasn't made the host appear in Network on LAN machines. Is there anything else that could be wrong?
krzee not sure... have you looked into debugging the wins stuff? have you used tcpdump and verified that the packets are not making it over the tunnel? it could be something besides the vpn
janjust However, it hasn't made the host appear in Network on LAN machines. Is there anything else that could be wrong? is WINS resolution now working? can you browse directly to a machine using its name, e.g. '\\someserver' ? what does the windows commandline tool 'nbtstat' report? WINS resolution is the first step , making it appear in the network neighbourhood is the next (but different!) step.
jason404 I am no longer using OpenVPN for this server, but it is still something I want to find the solution to for the future, as I still want to use it with mobile computers. I'm beta testing another solution at the moment, but I am not sure if I am allowed to mention it. I was able to use the hostnames in a UNC path (this worked before I was using WINS though - DNS saw to that), but I never got them to appear in network neighbourhood when they were on different subnets. What is the second step for enabling that? Thanks.
janjust depends a bit on the WINS server - for Samba you need to tell smbd/nmbd that it needs to be a domain master, otherwise win XP/7 clients will not show up in the neighbourhood list.
