Need help Discover Laptop

Sunny45 · ‎02-01-2022

Hello Team,

I have MID server (Windows Server 2016) installed on my Home Network. I want to run discovery on 3 laptops (Windows 10, Windows 7) which are all on same Home Network connected with Ethernet cable. All laptops IP address are reachable from MID server when I ping.

Please advise me how can I achieve that? What kind of credentials I should create?

Thanks.

-O- · ‎02-02-2022

You would need to create a Windows (Evaluation) Server, probably a virtual machine (on VirtualBox perhaps). You would need to install a domain (controller/DC) on that server. You would than join the laptops to that domain. Be very careful, do note down all authentication information for later use, cause if you at any point will loose authentication information, you will need to re-install all laptops. Once your experiment is done, make sure you remove all laptops from the domain before destroying the domain. Once you have the domain controller and computers have been joined to the domain, you need to create a domain user and a group policy to make that domain user local administrator on all computers. And than you can use that domain user when setting up the (a single) Windows Credential to discover any domain joined laptop.

View solution in original post

-O- · ‎02-01-2022

You would need to define Windows Credentials. It those computers are member of a domain you would create one for a domain account that has sufficient permissions on all computers (to be simple, you need to make that domain account administrator on all hosts), otherwise you need to define the same user with the same password on all computers, make that user local administrator on each host and define the Windows Credentials using that account.

For further details have a look at the official docs: Windows credentials.

-O- · ‎02-01-2022

Though to be fair, in case you will be using non-domain/local accounts on the Windows computers, it is not a must to define the same account with the same password on all computers, you can have the same or different accounts with different password, but in that case Discovery will take a bit longer as it will try all credentials on all computers until the correct one is found.

Sunny45 · ‎02-02-2022

Thanks Janos,

I created a local Admin account on one of the Laptop (Windows 7 Enterprise) and ran discovery.

Got below error message on discovery log. Can you please help me out what could be the issue here?

Greatly appreciate your reply.

Thanks.

-O- · ‎02-02-2022

It may be - I'm not sure - that the nature of the IP address is the problem. 169.254.0.0/16 is a non-routable class and it is inserted into a router interface table. Try changing the 169.254.*.* IP address into a routable one, e.g. 192.168.1.*. It might fix the issue.