NT 4 domain Question
bencairney
Member Posts: 76 ■■□□□□□□□□
in Off-Topic
Hello,
I am having a few issues with one of our domains at present. It still runs NT4 for the DC's and will do till about August. problem i'm having is with Wins resolution, it all worked fine until the PDC died and hasn't been right since even after promoting a BDC.
All 3 DC's have WINS configured and they are setup as push pull/partners, just doesn't seem to work from what I can tell. Sometimes you can use WINS for name resolution and sometimes not. The browse list is a bit random as well sometimes you see everything sometimes servers are missing.
I'm considering removing WINS from all of the DC's and putting in a couple of W2003 servers to runs WINS instead, has anyone done this before? in an NT domain.
We use w2003 for DNS and DHCP with no issues but i've not got a lot of WINS knowledge.
The domain is only servers all W2K and W2K3 apart from the dc's, there are no workstations.
Any advice/help gretly appreciated.
Thanks
Ben
I am having a few issues with one of our domains at present. It still runs NT4 for the DC's and will do till about August. problem i'm having is with Wins resolution, it all worked fine until the PDC died and hasn't been right since even after promoting a BDC.
All 3 DC's have WINS configured and they are setup as push pull/partners, just doesn't seem to work from what I can tell. Sometimes you can use WINS for name resolution and sometimes not. The browse list is a bit random as well sometimes you see everything sometimes servers are missing.
I'm considering removing WINS from all of the DC's and putting in a couple of W2003 servers to runs WINS instead, has anyone done this before? in an NT domain.
We use w2003 for DNS and DHCP with no issues but i've not got a lot of WINS knowledge.
The domain is only servers all W2K and W2K3 apart from the dc's, there are no workstations.
Any advice/help gretly appreciated.
Thanks
Ben
Comments
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sprkymrk
Member Posts: 4,884 ■■■□□□□□□□
How big is your network? Microsoft recommends only installing the minimum number of WINS servers necessary for your environment, but having a minimum of two. With WINS, less is really better as it avoids problems like you are having when one dies. If you wait long enough, WINS will probably start working reliably again. If you can't wait, you might (as you mentioned) uninstall WINS and make sure the database is deleted, then reinstalling WINS but only on 2 servers unless you have thousands of clients in a distributed network. If you can, run NBTSTAT -RR on all your servers and clients.
Avoid static entries if possible. Leave the defaults in place unless you have a very good reason to change them. Push/pull partners are the way to go (as opposed to limited push or pull). Configure each WINS server computer to point to itself.All things are possible, only believe. -
bencairney
Member Posts: 76 ■■□□□□□□□□
Thanks for the info, the network that this domain is on only has 300 servers, i'm not sure why they put 3 WINS servers in in the first place, it was before my time.
Things seem to have improved again since I reconfigured all the WINS servers to point to themselves as primary and backups as per an MS KB article as before they were all pointing at each other. I think I'll remove WINS from one of the servers and see if that helps and if it still doesn't work we'll try moving it onto 2003 servers which will hopefullt ease the management.