Why does disabling the TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper service lock me out of GPO

netbiosservicesysvoltcpipwindows-server-2003

I disabled TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper and started getting EventIDs 1030 and 1058. This thread said that I'd need to have it enabled. Indeed, when I started it up, the problem immediately went away. My question is, why? I thought NetBIOS wasn't needed unless you had Win98 clients on your network?

Best Answer

The TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper Service is what allows NetBIOS to work over TCP/IP and SMB. In the specific case of Group Policy, this particular service allows your workstation to resolve the AD Domain (italy.addom.example.com) in a way that it can access the SYSVOL and pull the Group Policies themselves. Turn it off and it won't be able to resolve the AD DNS domain into something it can use to fetch policies. It seems backwards, but it's quite provable.

Back in September I had the exact problem you're having right now. One of our desktop images had that particular service disabled, and was not getting GPOs. Turning that service fixed it completely.

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This helped me solve a very similar problem. It is probably exactly what you want: http://wiki.glassfish.java.net/Wiki.jsp?page=FaqRunAsWindowsService

Why does the W2k3 TCP/IP stack gets corrupted

Have you done a recent virus scan with an up to date virus scanner on the problem server? Is the server up to date on it's windows updates?

I'm guessing from your tags that your domain is a Windows 2003 active directory domain. I also take it that you have a single domain forest with two DCs.

It sounds like this server is the owner of all the FSMO roles on your domain (each of the five FSMO roles can only be on one server at a time).

For info about FSMO roles: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc773108(WS.10).aspx

You can determine if your problem server holds the FSMO roles like so on the command prompt:

dsquery server -hasfsmo rid
dsquery server -hasfsmo pdc
dsquery server -hasfsmo name
dsquery server -hasfsmo schema
dsquery server -hasfsmo infr

If your problem server holds all the roles above, I would transfer the roles to your good DC, as per: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc781578(WS.10).aspx

This will probably solve the problems you get when the problem server drops out. Once you have transferred the roles, you can take the problem DC offline and do some diags on it, or as a last resort rebuild it.

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