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The list of servers for this workgroup is not currently available

Filed Under Computer | 32 Comments

This message…

the list of servers for this workgroup is not currently available

must be one of the most annoying messages in Windows you could imagine. You have two computers on the same LAN, you can ping, so you know that the connections are right, but if you want to access the files on a share of the other computer you get this message without any hint what might be the cause.

I could try to explain why you just have to set this registry entry

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NetBT\Parameters

to 1 (instead of the 8 it was set to on two of my computers), but you are probably in a hurry to just access the other file and are not interested in research. If you are interested in the why then continue searching the web. I did and found my answer.

But as I said, you are most likely in a hurry, so set that registry value and reboot, and if you are as lucky as I am then you will be able to see the other machine(s) on the LAN and share happily.

Related posts:

  1. Long delay on Windows XP Shutdown
  2. ntfs.sys corrupt – Don’t believe Microsoft!

Posted by Merlin Silk - April 21st, 2008

Comments

32 Responses to “The list of servers for this workgroup is not currently available”

  1. Zeoch on June 4th, 2008 11:16 pm

    You might meant “NodeType”…

  2. Stone Taggart on August 3rd, 2008 6:06 pm

    um… you … you didn’t LIST A REGISTRY ENTRY… you only listed a directory WITHIN the registry. There are TWELVE KEYS in there. Which one were you supposedly setting to ’1′?

  3. Merlin on August 3rd, 2008 8:16 pm

    I guess I was in a hurry. Here is the info that should explain it all:

    DhcpNodeType
    This parameter specifies the NetBIOS over TCP/IP (NetBT) node type. The node type specified by the entry NodeType, if valid, overrides the value of this entry. If neither this entry nor NodeType exist in the registry, and there are no WINS servers configured on the network, then NetBT uses B-node name resolution. If there is at least one WINS server available, NetBT uses H-node name resolution.

    Meaning of Value

    1 = B-node. NetBT uses IP broadcast messages to register and resolve IP addresses from NetBIOS names.

    2 = P-node. NetBT uses point-to-point communication with a NetBIOS name server (in Windows Server 2003–based networks, this is the WINS server) to register and resolve IP addresses from NetBIOS names.

    4 = M-node. NetBT uses a mix of B-node and P-node to register and resolve NetBIOS names. M-node first uses broadcast resolution (B-node), then if necessary, uses a server query (P-node).

    8 = H-node. NetBT uses a hybrid of B-node and P-node. An H-node client always directly queries a name server first and then uses broadcasts only if the direct query fails.

  4. Kelvin on August 24th, 2008 6:59 pm

    Hurray! After hours of trying various offered solutions to this problem (reboot after reboot after reboot after changing various other things), this simple trick immediately took care of it. Thanks for posting it!

  5. inregistrare domenii on October 9th, 2008 8:23 am

    nice trick ;) thanks!

  6. jordan on November 4th, 2008 2:00 pm

    great tip

  7. Michael Selph on December 2nd, 2008 8:58 pm

    I have many hours trying to fix this problem. Also used up a lot of searching the web. But this tip worked. Thanks

  8. Paul on December 21st, 2008 12:17 pm

    I think I found this tip months ago and it worked .. until today. Two XP machines not talking. Any even deeper ideas?

  9. Mike on January 19th, 2009 8:42 pm

    Found this thru Google….worked for me too. I’ve spent two evenings fumbling through settings trying to figure out why two old Dells couldn’t talk to each other….this fixed it in two minutes. Thanks!

  10. anton on January 24th, 2009 10:08 am

    hey.
    i dont have DhcpNodeType in
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NetBT\Parameters
    what do i do?

  11. Merlin on January 24th, 2009 11:24 am

    Add a DWORD parameter to the key and give it the value 1 (Right-click in the empty space and select New)

  12. anton on January 25th, 2009 11:30 am

    i created it,and it isnt working :/

  13. Mike on February 8th, 2009 8:57 pm

    Dude, you are the MAN! I’ve spent days trying to figure out why one of my three systems couldn’t find hosts on the LAN. This fixed it. *thank you*

  14. Ron on April 18th, 2009 9:59 am

    After months of futile attempts to communicate with the rest of my network, brought on by an sp3 upgrade (dame u Microsoft . . . lol), I finally asked the right question “the list of servers for this workgroup is not currently available” found your response and fixed my problem. Thanks!

  15. Michael on May 10th, 2009 9:30 am

    Thank You, Thank You

    You can’t believe what a pain in ___ this has been to trouble shoot. I work on two computers side by side (portable and desktop) and need to constantly syncronize files. When I lost connectivity las week, I was high and dry.

    This fixed it. Google search term worked as Ron says above
    Thanks

  16. YellowShark on August 2nd, 2009 5:11 pm

    christ what a stupid problem and stupid solution to have to implement. but THANKS!!! serious. real serious. this fixed my crap. in case others have same problem, here’s a few more deets:

    2 win xp pro systems, both have passwords assigned to guest accts
    1 xp home system. couldn’t access workgroup, couldn’t access shares. the 2 xp pro systems had zero problems seeing and accessing each other. the xp home machine could see the others, but could not access them. the other machines coul see the xp home system, but also could not access it.

    this made things work, for that i am extremely grateful. blogs rule! share your knowledge!

  17. Curt on September 16th, 2009 12:22 am

    after scouring the web after weeks of struggling with this problem I found this blog. And I might add that it worked for me too

  18. anthonyrsc on October 28th, 2009 1:54 am

    Thanks!

  19. EE on December 23rd, 2009 7:11 pm

    Didn’t work for me. I had such high hopes. I have two XP machines that exhibit this behavior. I can connect to the network shares in Windows Explorer using names, which means the names are getting resolved correctly, but I canot see any shares in My Network Places\Entire Network\Microsoft Windows Network\workgroupname. My DhcpNodeType had been 8, but I get the same result using ’1.’ Oh well. On to the next search. Thank you for trying!

  20. Web Surf on January 10th, 2010 7:56 am

    This helped me to connecty my new WINDOWS 7 Laptop to my 3 other Vista PCs.

    There was no DhcpNodeType so I made the key, set to 1, rebooted, and all problems solved !!!

  21. papanik on February 1st, 2010 3:59 pm

    Like so many above, my issue has pestered me for a long time, albeit intermittently. This seems to have resolveded my problem for the moment, and I’m hopeful this fix has solved it for good! Thank you very, very much.

  22. Gratefull on February 24th, 2010 10:28 am

    Thank you so, so much. You Rock!!

  23. namefunnel on March 6th, 2010 8:51 am

    Thanks, that worked! At last! How in the world did you find this? What an incredibly obscure parameter setting!

  24. Merlin on March 6th, 2010 1:46 pm

    I really forgot where I might have gotten a hint to that setting, probably after digging through LOTS of MS support documents.
    But what’s funny, is that recently I had this error on a friends machine, and had to dig into my own blog here to find what to do about it.

  25. Muzaffar on March 14th, 2010 12:18 pm

    Man Excellent. you solve my problem. I make the cross cable connection. But I can’t Share the file.. I read you regedit setting very carefully and do this.

    Okay… one addition in it
    IST Computer 192.168.0.1
    2ND Computer 192.168.0.2

    and Parameter value I enter 8 in regedit setting…

    Thanks Man
    Thanks Again

  26. wavelles on April 16th, 2010 2:58 am

    Make sure the computer browser service is started!!

  27. Scott on May 12th, 2010 2:06 pm

    This is the only solution of about one thousand that worked for me. I have been trying for months to get my wireless windows 7 laptop on the same page as my wired xp desktop. Thanks for your help!

  28. Rich on July 3rd, 2010 6:30 am

    I had the same problem yesterday. After 5 years of running a peer-to-peer network with 18 computers, all of a sudden I was unable to browse my workgroup. I tried several of your fixes to no avail. I did set up one Win2000 box as a master browser but that didn’t help either. The only thing I did to completely fix the problem was to change the name of my workgroup (on all the computers in the network) and leave the Win2000 box as a master browser. So far everything is back to normal.

  29. Arvle Knight on August 5th, 2010 11:27 pm

    I did not have the the parameter. I added the DWORD parameter as you said, renamed it DhcpNodeType, and gave it a value of 1. My XP home network can now see my Windows 7 laptops. YEA!!! Thanks for the help!

  30. Richard Ellis on August 7th, 2010 11:44 am

    I had lost the capability to access shares on other computers on my home network (a workgroup), as well as the ability to print to a printer attached to another computer. These things had worked before.

    I tried adding the DhcpNodeType parameter, as well as some other tweaks, without success.

    However, I had recently installed these two services to access a corporate network, which started automatically at bootup:

    Check Point VPN-1 Securemote service
    Check Point VPN-1 Securemote watchdog

    Even though I wasn’t using the Checkpoint VPN, I still could not access the shares or printer.

    I changed the services’ Startup Type from Automatic to Manual, and rebooted. I now gained access to the shares and the printer. Then starting these services Manually resulted in printing failure (“The RPC server is unavailable.”) and a warning from Check Point that IP Forwarding must be disabled in order to use the SecureClient. After stopping these services, I did not regain access to my network shares without rebooting the PC.

    I haven’t researched this any deeper, but it looks like my problem is definitely related to installing the Check Point VPN software.

  31. Merlin Silk on August 7th, 2010 12:21 pm

    I guess I was lucky enough to never have to deal with VPNs on a computer that only sometimes needs them. Can’t therefore help with that but I know that installing a VPN can mess things up royally. I think it’s something that your default network now becomes that virtual network and the old – real – one is not seen any more. Seems to be what you are experiencing.

  32. Richard Ellis on August 8th, 2010 5:31 am

    Agreed. As a consultant working sometimes from home, my corporate clients provide VPN access to their resources, which is reasonable. I expected to lose access to my home network when I was actively using their VPN, but not when I was not using it. I also work with the Aventail VPN product in a similar manner, but without this issue.

    I’ve submitted the issue to the corporate technical staff for comment and relief. It would be nice if there were some configuration settings that would put this right.

    Thanks for your posts.

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