Product Installer Can’t find any User Accounts or Servers

Product Installer Can’t find any User Accounts or Servers

Issue Description 
When you run the InstallShield installer for certain Web Active Directory products, you cannot find an account to select using the Logon Information Browse dialog box and you get a message that says “The list is empty” or “Server not found.”  In addition, entering account information directly causes the installer to show a message that the account cannot be located because of “Server not found”.  With this issue, the product installer can’t find any user accounts or servers.

Issue Details 
The InstallShield installer uses a Windows API called ISNetApi to locate the server to use to browse for users and groups. For the server name to be verified or browsed, the installer needs the Computer Browser service, which is disabled on Windows Server 2008 by default (and possibly on other OS versions as well).

Solution 
To enable the Computer Browser service:

1.Go to the Server Manager console on the web server.

2.Expand the Configuration > Services node.

3.Enable the Computer Browser service and the services it depends on.

4.Run the installer again. Ensure you run the installer as an administrator.

More Information 
\There are a number of other possible causes of this issue as the interaction of the operating system and domain include many complex systems. Refer to the information below for further troubleshooting if enabling the Computer Browser service does not address this issue.

Note: Original material for this information was obtained from http://community.flexerasoftware.com/archive/index.php?t-185018.html and many thanks to Cary R for archiving this information.

Resolving the available domains and their corresponding domain controllers is reliant on NetServerEnum, which has a dependency on the Computer Browser service. So,

1.If you don’t have the Computer Browser service enabled
2.If there’s no firewall exception for it
3.If broadcast traffic is not enabled on your network (i.e. traffic to x.x.x.255 addresses)
4.If your computer is not a member of a domain
5.If No master browser has been designated on the network (this in theory will correct itself eventually)
6.If NetBIOS over TCP/IP not installed

…Then the LogonInformation dialog is going to have some problems browsing for Domain Controllers and related activities.

Some notes on determining if these cases apply to you:

•For case 3, this will be a problem when the client machine is not on a domain. Then, there’s no domain controller to talk to, and broadcast traffic gets sent out to see if anyone replies with their information.

•For case 5, you can either write a small app that calls the appropriate NetServerEnum call with the SV_TYPE_MASTER_BROWSER flag (as there doesn’t appear to be an existing utility out there for this).