It’s been a long time since I’ve troubleshot a WINS issue. I received a trouble ticket stating that an entire call center was down and that they were failing to get their login script working/faling to logon to their domain. So, I call the local tech guy at the site and we begin to troubleshoot. The first thing we tried is pinging the server as such:
ping server (by name)
(notice we are not fully qualifying the domain name)
By doing this, we are forcing wins to resolve it for us (hopefully).
It failed. Hmm.. so the next step was for me to try that on my machine. Ok, it worked. I was able to obtain the ip address for the destination machine. I had him ping it by ip. Ok. No connectivity issue.
Next, I had him ping it by fully qualifying it (this would force a DNS lookup to occur). Example:
ping server.local.domain.com
It worked.
Next, I asked the client to perform a ipconfig /all
I asked him to read me the WINS servers listed. The first one was disconnected about 3 years ago when one of our datacenters closed down!!! The second one seemed legitimate. I called the WINS group and asked them to verify that for me and I was correct however, that server was actually having problems. So they restarted the service on the box and that corrected the problem for the clients. But, was that really the problem?
NOPE! I don’t believe it was. I believe the real problem was that the site was using static WINS assignments rather than obtaining them through DHCP (like everyone else in our corporation). So, I asked the client to set his pc to obtain his WINS from corporate and reboot his workstation. He did and everything still worked. Matter of fact, he got completely different WINS servers altogether! This was great news. His action item was to make that same modifcation on all the machines at that call center (its going to be a long day for someone - not me).
Of course, everyone sat on the conference call arguing on what the root cause of the outage was. The bottom line here folks is communication and following standards within an organization. Three years ago when our datacenter closed, an email went out informing everyone of the change (this went out to ALL parties technical and non-technical). This is done so that everyone gets the message and can adequately prepare. Those who chose not to follow are in jeopardy - and that is what happened in this specific case. If we can’t follow those simple steps, then problems will always follow. Since this site was managing machines on their own they had made the decision to leave the pc’s as they were for the last 3 years (using static WINS servers). Obviously that was an incorrect decision to make on someones part and cost them a pretty big outage on this day!!
It’s ashame something like this had to happen, but you know.. it happens every day in some different form in IT departments everywhere.
Cheers…
Chuck
Feel free to email me or post a reply.
Email: c h u c k (at) g o f i x i t (dot) c o m
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