[leaf-user] Win2K DNS Problem

[Kory Krofft]

First let express my appreciation for all who have weighed in on this mess.
Several suggestions have been made in the last day or so and I am trying to
test each option suggested but I think first I should fill in a bit of the background
of my setup a bit more clearly.
The network is a small one with 4 Win98 clients, one RedHat client and the
problematic Win2K/PRO box. The Leaf box is connected to a Road Runner cable
modem. It is running dnscache in the standard Bering RC4 config. I have added
samba to it to serve Mozilla user profiles to the windows clients. It is not running
tinydns. The Leaf box is connected to the rest of the network through a Bay
Networks switch. All the clients work flawlessly with the exception of the
Win2k/Pro client.
The Win2k machine is configured pretty much stock except for a fixed IP
being assigned. 192.168.1.254 is the IP used by the Leaf internal i'face and
is specified ar the dns server and the gateway to all the clients on the network
The problem is that for some time I have seen delays of more than a minute
when trying to access web sites vie either Mozilla or IE which result in time
out errors where the browser can't resolve the URL to an IP. Once I leave the
browser up for a few minutes there are no further delays. Making the resolution
of this problem very difficult is its intermittent nature. In Win2k there is a new section under DNS settings where you can append
a DNS suffix or suffixes. After investigating DNS suffix I am still unsure whether
these setting would matter since I am using a workgroup set up not a domain.

Below I will try to cover the findings of the suggestions I have received. Where
the output of certain commands is lengthy I will post URLs to the data rather than
the data itself in an effort to reduce the size of an already lengthy post.

Lynn: I tried adding an entry in the domain box but windows will not allow an entry
it cannot find a domain controller for. It appears I must use only the workgroup setting.
DHCP is not really an option for this machine.

Brad: Output from tcpdump as well as an Ethereal dump
are at:
http:home.woh.rr.com/kkrofft/etherealout
http:home.woh.rr.com/kkrofft/tcpdump.txt
Both were run at the same time and were active as I tried to access www.yahoo.com,
www.etrade.com, and www.dogpile.com. I had flushed the dnscache and did
experience the lag during this experiment. Yahoo eventually resolved after 3 attempts
the other two never did.

I reran nslookup and now get
C:\>nslookup www.yahoo.net
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
*** Can't find server name for address 192.168.1.254: Timed out
*** Default servers are not available
Server: UnKnown
Address: 192.168.1.254

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: yahoo.com
Addresses: 64.58.79.230, 66.218.71.198
Aliases: www.yahoo.net

I think the reason I was not seeing the non authoritative part was the way
I issued the command previously.

I have disabled the Win2K/Pro DNS client and since then I have seen no lags so that
may be the solution.

Thanks for all the help,

Kory Krofft





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