1

Hello,

I just started using Spiceworks today and I have a question regarding scanning for network devices. It seems that when I scan for devices I can’t see anything outside of the subnet where my office is. I have tried scanning the subnet of one of our branch locations but it did not turn anything up. I realize that this may be something that the how-to videos would answer for me, but our firewall seems to be blocking those videos, so I thought I would ask here. Surely there is some way to get my entire network to appear in Spiceworks?

Thank you in advance for any input.

5 Spice ups
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Do you VPN into the branch? How do you support the branch?

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Set up a remote collector at your remote offices. They will scan their local networks and send the data to your central server. http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/283

Do NOT scan over VPN, that can seriously degrade your VPN.

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you will need to add firewall rules for the subnet where the spiceworks server is located on the branch machines, either using GPO or using psexec either manually or setting up a list of the machines to add the correct firewall permissions.

most of my remote offices have 2 machines and a printer, so I don’t have much of an issue scanning over VPN, however for my larger offices I use a locally deployed spiceworks collector to send the data back securely. As was previously recommended

you would need to tailor the network address’s to fit your environment.

In this example, the computers are in a workgroup of multiple class C networks. To do this you must use the “CUSTOM” or “Custom addresses=” option to avoid the MS defaults that are either too broad “Any Computer, (including those on the Internet )” or too restrictive “My network ( subnet only)”.

NETSH.EXE FIREWALL SET SERVICE REMOTEADMIN ENABLE CUSTOM 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0;
NETSH.EXE FIREWALL SET ALLOWEDPROGRAM %SYSTEMROOT%\\SYSTEM32\\WBEM\\UNSECAPP.EXE WMICALLBACKS ENABLE CUSTOM 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0;
netsh firewall add portopening protocol = ALL port = 135 name = RPC/DCOM mode = ENABLE scope = CUSTOM addresses = 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0

I used the free Sysinternals psexec.exe program from the PStools package to remote execute these commands on WinXPP SP2 computers to enable WMI.

in addition I usually also add

NETSH.EXE FIREWALL SET SERVICE FILEANDPRINT ENABLE CUSTOM 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0

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Thank you all for your responses. As it turns out, I just needed to have more patience with the system. My other devices eventually showed up. Thanks again!

1 Spice up