Windows Vista & 2008 Network Map

Windows Vista & 2008 Network Map

Despite having run Vista for 9 months now, it wasn’t until playing with 2008 that I finally felt the need to draw a pretty map of a network.

Firstly, I tried to enable ‘Network Discovery’ in 2008’s ‘Network and Sharing Center’ by selecting ‘Turn on network discovery’ and clicking ‘Apply’. The default setting of ‘custom’ was preserved. I could turn off Network discovery, but the nearest I could get to turning it on, was ‘custom’.

After a lot of googling I finally got ‘network discovery’ to stay on by enabling 2 services –

‘SSDP Discovery’ and ‘UPnP Device Host’. These changes meant that 2 new entries appeared in the Network list, namely tsclient (presumably representing a terminal service) and my Netgear router).

To see the network map in either Vista or 2008, go to ‘Network and Sharing Center’ and click the ‘View full map’ in the top right of the window. My first attempt from a Vista laptop is shown here >

Not much of a network map, I’m sure you’ll agree.

On powering up the rest of my network, the situation only improved slightly with the addition of the 2008 box.

Getting XP & 2003 ‘on the map’...

Wikipedia provides a concise explanation that Network mapping is provided by the Link Layer Topology Discovery protocol or LLTD (like we need another acronym…) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_Layer_Topology_Discovery)

The Vista & 2008 Os' use LLTD to provide the map. Basically I needed to install LLTD on pre vista/2008 clients. For XP, this was simple enough. XP has an update to install the LLTD protocol (kb922120) http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922120/

For 2003, no such update exists, so the issue has to be forced >

1) Run the KB922120 installer on the 2003 machine (it is going to fail, but stick with me here...)
2) Ignore the error message, but dont press OK to quit the installer.
3) Look on the root of your drive for a crazily named installer folder (was 4e3502ace711713573322646a0e29dbb on mine) and copy the contents elsewhere.
4) Now press OK to quit the installer.
5) Configure your nic (right click network card and select properties).
6) Add a protocol, go to 'have disk' and navigate to wherever the installer files are saved.
7) From the SPCGDR\IP\ subfolders locate the .inf file and click OK.

This will install LLTD and the 2003 box will now be part of the network map.


My 2008 Network Map >

My Vista Network Map >