Disappearing Login Points
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by Dana Daugherty
The systems managers at my company made the decision to
hide NT servers from the Domain Browse List that aren't used
as file servers. This article describes the results of such an
action on my SMS infrastructure. It has always been a policy to keep our browse list as
clean as possible. We don't share 9x machines, and we've
always hidden NT\W2K workstations using the net config server
/hidden command. Even with removing our workstations, the
browse list is still a bit too cluttered with servers that are
of no use to most employees. Enter the idea to hide all
machines except for the file servers. After we started hiding servers I noticed something
interesting in my Site Servers list. It was shrinking! About
90% of our servers are BDCs. It's a little easier for system
admins to centrally manage the security aspects of BDCs rather
than member servers. You probably know where I'm going with
this <grin>. SMS uses the browse list to find Domain Controllers. It
then assigns Domain Controllers as SMS Login Points and copies
all the appropriate files to them. For SMS implementations
that rely on SMS Logon Installation or SMS Logon Discovery,
hiding BDCs could be a serious problem. Fortunately, mine
doesn't fall into that category. I used SMS Logon Installation
to initially deploy all the clients. After I was up and
running I removed login scripts from users' accounts and
changed heartbeat discovery to every day. This was mainly due
to the large number of traveling laptop users I have that
visit different sites. I then have the PC setup group run SMS
man. From all that I have experienced, read and heard, it
appears that there is no workaround for this issue. So, moral
of the story, if you need to use SMS Login Scripts don't hide
your domain controllers.
