WINS Pain

Hi.

I am suffering WINS pain.

I have 13 servers. 3 combined DC's, DNS server and Wins servers and 10
member servers. In addition we have 800 XP pro clients.

I can ping via hostname and via DNS hostname.local

All appears to be well.

But from time to time. I come across browser elections and non wins servers
(& even XP clients) deciding they are master browsers for their domain.This
clutters up my event logs and I have read KB articles etc to try and stop
this occuring.

But it still does. Am I expecting too much in wanting to got a whole week
without seeing any of these errors on my servers? All my clients have the IP
of the WINS servers specified. All the servers have the the IP address of
WINS servers specified. Why do they ever need to have a master browser
election?

Is this because our network is vlan'd? or because WINS is crap?

Andy.

You seem a bit confused about how this works. WINS has only a minor part
to play in all of this. What really does the work is the computer browser
service.

Are any of the servers multihomed? Are any of them used as remote access
servers? Both of these conditions can cause browser problems.

You will find a description of the browser service in KB188001 and a
troubleshooter in KB188305.

news.zen.co.uk wrote:
> Hi.
>
> I am suffering WINS pain.
>
> I have 13 servers. 3 combined DC's, DNS server and Wins servers and 10
> member servers. In addition we have 800 XP pro clients.
>
> I can ping via hostname and via DNS hostname.local
>
> All appears to be well.
>
> But from time to time. I come across browser elections and non wins
> servers (& even XP clients) deciding they are master browsers for
> their domain.This clutters up my event logs and I have read KB
> articles etc to try and stop this occuring.
>
> But it still does. Am I expecting too much in wanting to got a whole
> week without seeing any of these errors on my servers? All my clients
> have the IP of the WINS servers specified. All the servers have the
> the IP address of WINS servers specified. Why do they ever need to
> have a master browser election?
>
> Is this because our network is vlan'd? or because WINS is crap?
>
> Andy.

"Bill Grant" <not.available@online> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> You seem a bit confused about how this works. WINS has only a minor
> part to play in all of this. What really does the work is the computer
> browser service.
>
> Are any of the servers multihomed? Are any of them used as remote
> access servers? Both of these conditions can cause browser problems.
>
> You will find a description of the browser service in KB188001 and a
> troubleshooter in KB188305.
>

Thanks for the KB articles. I have looked at both and know have a clearer
understanding of how things hang together.

We have just the one multi homed server and that's our ISA 200 firewall with
two network cards. None of the other machines that decide to force elections
are multi homed.

We do have A Cisco catalyst core switch that is routing at layer three
between all our vlans. We have about 12 vlans in total.

So, from what I have read I could just disable the computer browse service
on each client / server and provided all our apps were dns aware we could
operation with any problems? I suppose browsing my network places would fail
but I would still be able to map user drives to shares etc?

All our drive mapping is done through net use commands.

So for each users home directory we use a: Net use u: \home

This wouldn't be affected by the loss of WINS & the browser service would
it?

Feedback appreciated.

Thanks,

Andy.

Do you have any pre-2000 machines on your network?

Micah A. Norman