Enabling workgroup clients to locate SMS and ConfigMgr site systems using LMHOSTS files

System Center Configuration Manager can Manage Workgroup Computer clients but Workgroup computers must be able to locate a server locator point for site assignment and their default management point in order to be managed. Because workgroup clients cannot query Active Directory Domain Services to find these site systems, in this situation, you have three options:

1. The server locator point can be specified in the CCMSetup.exe installation command-line parameters. For more information about doing this see About Configuration Manager Client Installation Properties at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb680980.aspx.
2. You can manually publish the server locator point and management point in WINS. For more information about doing this see, How to Manually Add Configuration Manager Site Information to WINS at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb632567.aspx.
3. The server locator point can be specified in the LMHOSTS file on workgroup computers when a WINS server is not available

For Workgroup clients to locate these site systems, you need to enable some sort of NetBIOS name resolution. If you do not have a WINS server in place to support these clients, you can use an LMHOSTS file to enable site system name resolution for Workgroup clients.
To use the LMHOSTS file for site system name resolution, just add the following information (where <site code> is the site code for the primary site the client should be assigned to) to the LMHOSTS file. The LMHOSTS file is generally located in the client's %WINDIR%\system32\drivers\etc directory:
<IP address of MP> "MP_<site code> \0x1A" #PRE
<IP address of SLP> "SMS_SLP \0x1a" #PRE

NOTE: For the lmhosts file to work, it should not have a file extension. If you only find the lmhosts.sam (sample file) in that location just modify the file for your purposes and save it without the .sam file extension.

Because these names contain special characters, they must be enclosed in quotation marks. There must be a total of 20 characters within the quotation marks. There must be a total of 20 characters within the quotation marks. Yes, I wrote that twice on purpose for emphasis! If there aren't 20 characters in the name then using the LMHOSTS file for this will not work. Make sure that the backslashes are at the 16th character the end quotes should be after the 20th character.
Here's a handy trick for doing this that I picked up from How to write an Lmhosts file for domain validation and other name resolution issues (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/180094):
There must be a total of 20 characters within the quotations (the domain name plus the appropriate number of spaces to pad up to 15 characters, plus the backslash, plus the NetBIOS hex representation of the service type).

To help determine where the sixteenth character is, copy the following line to your Lmhosts file:# IP Address "123456789012345*7890" Line up the double quotation marks (") by adding or removing spaces from the comment line, and put the \ on the sixteenth column (the column marked with the asterisk). You must use spaces after the name and before the \, not a tab.
After that has been done, to verify it worked just open up a command prompt and enter the following command to refresh the name cache:
nbtstat -R