Recommended Practices for WINS Servers

Consider upgrading your Wins servers to Windows 2000 (W2k) to take advantage of the following features:

	Persistent TCP Connections: You can configure a WINS server to maintain persistent connections with one or more replication partners to elimniate the overhead of opening and terminating TCP connections. This increases the speed of replication.
	Manual tombstoning allows you to mark a record for deletion, ensuring that the tombstone state of the record is replicated to all WINS servers. Without tobmstoning you might delete a record on one server, only to have that change undone by replication from another server.
	Better management via MMC: This includes the ability to verify database consistency, delete dynamic & static records, filter & search for specific records, select and act on multilpe records, and export the WINS database to a CSV file.

If you haven't already done so, Upgrade your NT 4.0 servers to Service Pack 4 or greater. As of this writing the current NT service pack release is 6a. With SP4, the WINS Administrator program can delete individual mappings. Be sure to copy the updated program files to any client workstations that run the WINS administrator program.
Have at least one replication partner.
Each WINS server should point to itself for both primary and secondary Wins
Carefully read and implement the recommendations in the following Technet artice:

PSS ID Number: Q185786
Article last modified on 07-31-1998
WinNT:4.0
winnt

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The information in this article applies to:
- Microsoft Windows NT Server version 4.0

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SUMMARY

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This article discusses the recommended practices for implementing theWindows Internet Name Service (WINS). Followingthese practices should decrease the occurrence of WINS problems.

MORE INFORMATION

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- It is highly recommended that a WINS server point to itself as primary and secondary WINS in the TCP/IP configuration.

For additional information, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

ARTICLE-ID: Q150737

TITLE : Setting Primary and Secondary WINS Server Options

- It is highly recommended to use the correct ratio of WINS servers toWINS clients.

A general rule is to have one WINS server for each 10,000 users plus one additional WINS server for redundancy. The redundant server does not have to be located at the same site. For additional information on WINS Ratios, please see the following White Paper available on the Microsoft anonymous ftp server:

File Name: Winswp.doc

Location : ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/winnt/winnt-docs/papers/

Title : "Windows Internet Naming Service (WINS)" (Page 44)

- It is highly recommended to use a hub and spoke replication model.

For additional information, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

ARTICLE-ID: Q168076

TITLE : WINS Fails to Converge

-and-

Page 24 of the WINS White Paper mentioned above.

- It is highly recommended to periodically run Jetpack (for example, oncea month or once a quarter).

For additional information, please see the following articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

ARTICLE-ID: Q167812

TITLE : WINS and DHCP Dynamic Database Compaction in Windows NT

4.0

ARTICLE-ID: Q145881

TITLE : How to use Jetpack.exe To Compact a WINS or DHCP Database

- Multihomed WINS servers require additional configuration in order for replication to occur. For information on how to configure multihomed WINS servers please see the following article in Microsoft Knowledge Base:

ARTICLE-ID: Q139380

TITLE : Multihomed WINS Server Replication Partner Failures

- It is highly recommended to not use static entries for WINS clients.

For additional information, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

ARTICLE-ID: Q177140

TITLE : How to Remove Static WINS Entries from All WINS Servers

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Version : WinNT:4.0

Platform : winnt

Issue type : kbinfo

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