All these years and I’ve never known how to determine what the “master browser” was on my networks. How many times do you see those event log errors about “such and such is not the master browser” or “unable to get a browse list”. Not that I know how to fix all that, but at least I can find out WHAT THE MASTER IS in the first place!
There’s a cool utility called: browstat
Run from command line. There is one stupid thing though, you need to determine your Netbios transport first. To do that, run: net config rdr
C:\>net config rdr
Computer name \\MYSERVER
Full Computer name myserver.yourdomain.com
User name administrator
Workstation active on
NetbiosSmb (000000000000)
NetBT_Tcpip_{0FCE584B-9B98-4D26-A241-1A070D06767A} (00188B3A1EE6)
NetBT_Tcpip_{F55EF45C-33E5-4842-A4AC-8DFF82D07B76} (00188B3A1EE8)
Software version Windows 2000
Workstation domain YOURDOMAIN
Workstation Domain DNS Name YOURDOMAIN.com
Logon domain YOURDOMAIN
COM Open Timeout (sec) 0
COM Send Count (byte) 16
COM Send Timeout (msec) 250
The command completed successfully.
So you can see… what a mess! You need this:
NetBT_Tcpip_{0FCE584B-9B98-4D26-A241-1A070D06767A}
And to get your master browser run this:
browstat getmaster NetBT_Tcpip_{0FCE584B-9B98-4D26-A241-1A070D06767A} YOURDOMAIN
It should return something like: Master Browser: MYSERVER
You can also run: browstat status YOURDOMAIN
This will list all kinds of useful info, including your transports. It shows your backup servers, as well as your master browser.