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: ssprunk@cisco.com ----- Original Message ----- From: Carter, Gregory To: 'nanog@merit.edu' Cc: 'jrivera@stei.com' ; 'srabalais@stei.com' 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? +(Omni@Dynmc.Net)------------------------------------------------------+ | Dynamic Networking Solutions InterX Technologies | | Senior Network Administrator bits/keyID 1024/7DF9C285 | | omni@interx.net omni@itstudio.net omni@undernet.org omni@webpop3.com | +--------[ DC 50 57 59 C3 76 46 E8 EB 75 A8 94 FE 96 9E D3 ]----------+