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Before I go installing a Linux box with bind or similar, I'm making a final plea for help.

We have a small office with a Win2K3 Standard Server hosting our domain and providing the office nameserver. The workstations are all Windows XP or Windows 7, pretty standard stuff. There are some Linux machines acting as development servers but none provide DNS.

Our problem is that, at random, a Windows workstation will return a "Host not found" (NX result) for local (WINS) lookups until we issue:

ipconfig /registerdns
ipconfig /flushdns

on that workstation. During this loss, other workstations successfully look the target up and the Windows Server itself shows the WINS address as present. These "outages" occur at random - one might occur five minutes after the ipconfig reset trick, while later in the day I might get away with several hours of uninterrupted service.

This only seems to occur on WINS addresses - "agile" for instance or "billing" which are both registered with IPs on the server. Many of our staff have taken to adding the host and IP map to their Windows' hosts file due to the frequency of occurance.

Any ideas?

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  • adding a linux based dns server is not going to fix a thing.
    – tony roth
    Mar 9, 2012 at 14:25

1 Answer 1

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If you have a domain AND if all your workstations are joined to this domain, you don't need WINS. Just uninstall the WINS server. Every workstation will use the dns provided by the domain controler.

If you want to use WINS, use ipconfig /displaydns to see what is the faulty address. Maybe you have one workstation registering with the wrong ip address. This should be a workstation outside of your domain.

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  • billing.softoption.local now shows as "Name does not exist" on my Win7 workstation. My colleague's XP worksttion just got the same for it, performed the ipconfig /registerdns trick and it now resolves correctly. Does this help narrow things down?
    – jmkgreen
    Mar 9, 2012 at 12:26

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