Adding domain and workgroup PCs after the fact

Managing workgroups in contemporary environments, particularly with Vista and later systems, can be problematic. The key component to populating a workgroup in Patch Manager is the availability of a machine running a NetBIOS Browser service. However, on server operating systems, Network Discovery and the Computer Browser service is disabled by default. On Windows 7 systems, the Computer Browser service is enabled, but Network Discovery is not.

So first you'll need to determine if you have any systems on the network functioning as a NetBIOS Browser. Most likely, you do not. Enabling the Computer Browser service and Network Discovery on a Windows Server system will give you that. Quite often you'll also need to use a management tool to force a browser election so whatever workstation is currently holding that browser service (which is probably empty), will give it up to the server OS that should be that workgroup's Master Browser.

This scenario is discussed in Chapter 2 (bottom of page 7 of the Patch Manager Administration Guide.

Thank you for your response Garvin!

This workgroup is attached to a network that is primarily AD. It's VLAN is seperate from the core network but runs to the same internet connection. Network Discovery is enabled on all workgroup machines.

This browser tool you speak of, do you have one you've used and like?

We have Patch manager and WSUS on it's own seperate machines and would like to leverage these to manage updates for our workgroup as well as the core AD.

Thank you for your help!

The VLAN may also be contributing to this, given that NetBIOS and workgroup browsing is a broadcast technology that is constrained by network boundaries ... physical or virtual.

What you might have to do is deploy a Patch Manager Automation Role server inside that VLAN, and configure an Automation Routing Rule for the WORKGROUP that uses the Auto Server inside the VLAN.

For NetBIOS browser management, I use the BROWSTAT utility which is part of the XP SP2 Support Tools kit.

Apparently the network isn't quite as segmented as I had thought. They can ping each other over the network via IP. I'm assuming this means I can just edit their host files or registry settings to point to the WSUS server and begin managing them centrally. Is this correct?