Monday, February 11, 2013

MS Server 2008 R2 and Network Discovery

While going through some lab material re: name resolution basics and options on Microsoft Server 2008 R2, I hit some hurdles while trying to enable Network Discovery.

Under Network and Sharing Center | Advanced sharing settings, I was not able to even have the radio button stay checked until I confirmed the following services were started:

SSDP Discovery
UPnP Device Host
Function Discovery Resource Publication
Function Discovery Provider host
Link Layer Topology Discoverer Mapper

Even then, the results of navigating to Start | Network provided a blank screen.  There was no warning that Network Discovery was not enabled, but there were no results either.

The last step was starting the service:

Computer Browser

It makes sense in hindsight, but the Microsoft curriculum might associated with my study (and likely yours) is a little lacking.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

MS Server 2003 Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration

Given this MS Windows 2003 server was a lab server and I just wanted to eliminate the chance of this security feature from stalling or preventing me from doing lab work, I simply chose to uninstall it.  It seems there is no other more elegant method to disable the feature or stop the associated security processes other than actually running an uninstall process.  This seems drastic, but at least it's easy...

Go to Start | Control Panel | Add or Remove Programs
Then, Add / Remove Windows Components
Then, uncheck the Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration



 - or to only remove the feature from Administrators group

Click Details
Then, uncheck For administrators groups

The uninstall is quite fast and doesn't seem to require a reboot.