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Re: WINS Proxy vs. Cisco IP Helper

  • From: Stephen Sprunk
  • Date: Tue Apr 25 16:43:04 2000

If possible, I'd set DHCP to force all of the PC's towards your WINS servers
and make them P-type nodes.  This will eliminate broadcast WINS traffic and
remove the need for WINS helpers entirely; that'd be a Good Thing(tm).

How you architect your WINS servers beyond that, I can't help you with.  As
mentioned, the Samba docs are a good starting point.

S

     |          |         Stephen Sprunk, K5SSS, CCIE #3723
    :|:        :|:        Network Consulting Engineer, NSA
   :|||:      :|||:       14875 Landmark Blvd #400; Dallas, TX
.:|||||||:..:|||||||:.    Email: [email protected]


----- Original Message -----
From: Carter, Gregory
To: '[email protected]'
Cc: '[email protected]' ; '[email protected]'
Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2000 14:25
Subject: WINS Proxy vs. Cisco IP Helper



Greetings!

I have a bit of a philosophical question regarding the use of a WINS Proxy
versus using Cisco's IP Helper to forward UDP datagram packets off to a
central WINS server.  Let me give some background to the setup of the
company I work for.

Currently we are noticing that we have too many WINS servers running
throughout our divisions and some of our servers are corrupting the WINS
database.  As a whole our IS divisional managers will be meeting soon and
would like to  discuss this situation and limit our WINS servers down to one
per division.  We have a total of five divisions; the fifth is a central
office where for the most part the whole company looks to as the head
office.  Each division is also split up into regions, which usually have a
hub site that is connected up to the division hub site then to our main hub
site (the fifth division).  All of our locations are setup on frame relay
and all of them have Cisco 1600 routers.  Currently we have a WINS server at
the division site, and two regions with WINS servers in them.  The Cisco
routers use IP helper at our spoke sites to forward the UDP datagram packets
from the local LAN of the spoke sites up to the WINS server for that region.
The regional WINS servers then push pull up to the division WINS server and
the division WINS server push pulls up to the company's main hub site (fifth
division) thereby syncing the entire company.

By limiting the divisions to a single WINS server obviously the regional
WINS servers will either need to go away or they will need to be replaced
with WINS proxy servers that will proxy the requests back up to the
divisional server.

My concern is to whether it would be wiser for us to dump the regional WINS
servers altogether and change IP helper to point back to the division WINS
server instead, or to go ahead and shut down the regional WINS servers and
replace them with WINS proxying.  I have come to the conclusion that either
way would take the same amount of bandwidth, and as far as redundancy is
concerned we can simply change the secondary WINS server address in DHCP to
the main hub
site's address.

Does anyone here have a relevant opinion on this matter, or any reasons not
to implement one or the other of the solutions?

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