When XP is using the secondary DNS and I want it to use the primary which is now available, I just disable/re-enable the NIC. I believe this holds true for Vista/7 as well.
If the primary was working and then becomes unavailable, I find that it will keep trying it, timeout (30 seconds), then use the secondary. But it should definitely fail over to secondary servers with some annoying delay. Bouncing the NIC will eliminate the delay. Also the SP3 IP stack is modern, not old. It was completely replaced in SP3 using the same codebase as Vista. Carl From: Michael B. Smith [mailto:mich...@smithcons.com] Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2010 9:24 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Domain controllers, what is supposed to happen. It's possible that XP may require a reboot before it retires an unreachable DNS server. I dunno. But it should work just fine. Regards, Michael B. Smith Consultant and Exchange MVP http://TheEssentialExchange.com From: Reimer, Mark [mailto:mark.rei...@prairie.edu] Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2010 9:15 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Domain controllers, what is supposed to happen. Sorry, long email. Windows 2003 Native Domain, two domain controllers, server1 and server2. Workstations are primarily XP, some Windows 7. Other servers (file server, email etc) are all Windows 2003. We have about 150 workstations. We have AD DNS, and WINS. Server1 has FSMO roles Infrastructure Master, PDC Emulator, RID Master. Server2 has FSMO roles Domain Naming Master, Schema Master. Both are GC's. In the DHCP settings workstations get both server's IP's as DNS. Server2 is listed first, then server1. Primary WINS server is server1, secondary is Server2. Last night Server1 went down. It was off hours, but I got a call from some late night worker (using XP), saying they couldn't do anything. Couldn't reach any of the servers, or internet. I was able to get the server going again (bad memory chip, so I just took it out). I thought that if one server went down, the DNS/WINS look up would go to the other server. But it might be slower (note, I didn't try any of this, just going on what the user said). Comments? If I didn't get Server1 running again, what should I have done? I assume I should do the following. 1. Seize the FSMO roles from server1, and put them on server2. 2. Change DHCP so Primary WINS server is server2. Maybe even take out Server1 as DNS/WINS possibilities. Then work on getting Server1 running again, or replacing it. Did I miss anything? Thanks for any help and insight you can give. Mark ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
