Windows 7 Unable to view the event log remotely from a Windows XP computer

FridayChild

New Member
Joined
Feb 4, 2010
I am the systems administrator in a small Active Directory domain with Windows 2003 servers and Windows XP Pro/Vista Business/7 Pro clients.
The computer I use for administrative tasks runs Windows XP SP3.
While I have always been able to use the Event Viewer MMC snap-in to connect ("Connect to remote computer...") to remote Windows XP and Vista clients and view the event logs, I have discovered that I cannot do the same on remote Windows 7 machines: the error is "the network path was not found". Please note that it's not a permission problem or a general MMC problem because, for instance, I can connect to the same Windows 7 computers using the Computer Management snap-in. If I do so, I can browse through all nodes (eg. view, start and stop services on the remote machine) but if I click on "event viewer" from the same snap-in, the "network path" error comes up again. It looks like the problem is specific to Event Viewer.
I have googled quite a bit, and found no relevant knowledge.
Can you help me?
 
Welcome to the forums, Friday Child.

FC said:
if I click on "event viewer" from the same snap-in, the "network path" error comes up again.

1. Make sure that your Domain Controller is online. If you have several DC's then you may want to turn them all on, or at least turn the primary DC on.

2. Make sure those network places are active when you click on the event viewer

3. Temporarily disable the Internet Connection Firewall on the remote computer that you're trying to access:

Control Panel => Network Connections Properties => Advanced tab => Clear the Protect my computer and network by limiting or preventing access to this computer from the Internet check box
 
We have two domain controllers and both are online 24/7.
The target computers are online and reachable in every way (ping, File and printer sharing, remote desktop; even, as I wrote earlier, MMC snap-ins bar the event viewer one).
I will try to turn off the firewall ASAP, but I can't see how MMC'ing to a remote machine would involve different ports based on the particular snap-in in use (they all should make use of the RPC ports which are open by group policy).
Trying to remote MMC on firewalled systems usually causes another kind of error ("RPC server not available" after a few seconds, while in this case it's "network path not found" and it's almost instant).
 
Back
Top Bottom