Confusion over how to configure WINS

[Mac]

Hi Bob,  (and everyone else)


>From: "Hutton, Rob" <HuttonR at plymart.com>
>Subject: Confusion over how to configure WINS
>Date:   Fri, 5 Nov 1999 06:10:31 +1100
>
>  We have a network of about 24 remote site all connecting to our home
>office across a mixture of private frame relay and VPN across the internet.
>In order to simplify our life, and at the same time, reduce the amount of
>non critical and chatty traffic transversing the WAN links during business
>hours, we are putting servers at each remote to do DHCP, DNS, WINS, and file
>and print sharing.  From the documentation, I'm not sure whether we need to
>turn WINS server on at each remote site.  Or if I need to set WINS proxy to
>yes, and put in the WINS address of the  PDC at the home office?  Our
>network is private 10.*.*.* addressing, fully subnetted with each remote
>site having either a /19 or /24 subnet mask.


Right.

As a general princple you should only ever have ONE server doing WINS.
If you want to have more then they should have a strong mechanism for
synchronising their lists with each other.  WinNT servers can do this (I
think the PDC and BDC do for eaxmple).

Samba (AFAIK) does not (yet).

WINS proxy is probably a reasonable half way house, but it won't
completely eliminate the Win-chatter across your WAN.

My advice ?  Stick with just one WINS server, by all means have multiple
DHCP and DNS servers.

P.S. One possible alternative (I've never tried it, but it should work),
is to abandon WINS altogther.  If you have just Win9x/NT and Samba
clients they can get by quite happily on DNS alone.  You'll have to
enable 'NetBIOS Resolution uses DNS' on the Win9x machines (use
'winipcfg' to check) (and the equivalent on WinNT)).


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