by Filip
5. September 2008 10:55
I read this article from Mark Minasi today that I wanted to point out.
I’ve often heard network engineers complain about chatty Windows computers on the network. And guess what: they’re right. Windows by default is very noisy.
One of the biggest offenders is the Computer Browser service. It is a left-over name resolution service conceived in the NetBIOS era, primarily used to fill the ‘Network Neighborhood’ list in Windows Explorer. In order to maintain this list, every machine on which the service is running will announce its presence on the network every 12 minutes. Moreover, periodic elections generate even more traffic whenever a potential master- or backup browser is stopped or started. As we can read in TechNet KB article 188001 the service basically is obsolete since the appearance of Active Directory in Windows 2000.
Dear fellow Windows administrators, please help clear the reputation of Windows as a noisy OS, and turn the Computer Browser service on your Windows workstations off! You don’t need it anyway. First of all, you don’t really need each and every workstation to pop up in the Network list. It just makes it more difficult for your users to find anything. Furthermore, DNS, publications in AD, and more recently, Network Discovery, provide much more elegant solutions to publish shared network resources.
If you really rely on the Computer Browser service, then at least control it by setting the ‘MaintainServerList’ and ‘IsDomainMaster’ entries in the registry
(in HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Browser\Parameters). More info here
flip