Technical question with WINS/DNS

[Sir Kenyth]

When you put an entry for a multihomed computer in WINS, you put in the IP addresses for all the hosts. Will name resolution requests to the WINS server get IP addresses in a "round robin" manner, or will it simply give the first available servers IP?

In other words, I have two identical web servers that I want to share the load for a web based application. Each server has it's own IP, but I only want one name to resolve to both these servers IP's in an alternating fashion. I know that DNS will do it, but we don't have a DNS server and the netadmin doesn't really want one implemented either. We use an outside DNS server for internet domain name resolution. WINS is used for our intranet name resolution.

I know, I know! With active directory and W2K we should be getting away from Netbios, but we're still using NT4 for our servers. I'm also not the netadmin and don't get to make calls like a W2KAS transition. Something about the high cost to implement it and the "If it aint' broke, don't fix it!" mentality.

[Sir Kenyth]

Ummmmmm................. Anybody?

Any tech geeks out there? Anyone?


*sigh* I guess I'll have to go to "www.techrepublic.com". Bummer!

[andrewas]

I think trickster might know about this stuff, but he left ages ago.

I coudldn't turn up anything specific, but there was something about WINS servers trying to match servers to clients by subnet, then by net, and then randomly if no match was found. Not exactly a round-robin system, but it may suffice.

[Sir Kenyth]

Originally posted by andrewas: I think trickster might know about this stuff, but he left ages ago. I coudldn't turn up anything specific, but there was something about WINS servers trying to match servers to clients by subnet, then by net, and then randomly if no match was found. Not exactly a round-robin system, but it may suffice.

Thanks! I think it will work just fine myself. This application isn't high end, so one server should have plenty of power anyway. I've been testing name resolution with pings the past few days. Sometimes I get one IP, sometimes I get the other. Looks like success!