[geeks] Windows 7 File & Printer Sharing Nightmare

[Mike Meredith]

On Wed, 07 Jan 2015 10:36:47 +0000, Mark Benson wrote:
> I give you due warning, some of you may vomit when you read the setup
> we have here. It's not the best, I'm aware.

Something similar which will have you rolling about the floor laughing,
and perhaps something worth checking ...

> The issue is we share printers from 4 PCs to the rest of the LAN
> (about a dozen PCs total) mostly due to desk space limitations. At
> random (as in not every day, or on every PC), or due to some factor I
> can't see, some PCs refuse point blank to talk to each other via
> Windows sharing. Printing breaks and everyone starts complaining.

Something similar at $work today[0] which eventually boiled down to (on
a random scattering of Windows workstations) :-

1. ping would report "host not found" when pinging a known working
   address.

2. nslookup (or host where I've been fiddling and installed proper
   tools) would successfully resolve the address.

3. If you specifically invoked a 32-bit ping it would work fine.

After spending several hours demonstrating that it wasn't the DNS (it
takes a while to overcome the "logical" conclusion), it was eventually
diagnosed as a registry corruption. Turns out there's a registry key[1]
that has something to do with DLLs used in name resolution, and the
64-bit one had been corrupted.

Randomly.

And it would sometimes fix itself. But not all the time.

0: At a time when I was huddled away in a build room trying to test a
   new firewall (academic class).

1: Unfortunately I've not got the precise details, but I can probably
   dig them up if it looks like it's worth checking. At least a
   work-around[2].

2: Yes we're an ITIL shop. And yes my head hurts.

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