remote site ramblings

[m0rk]

We have a remote site, which is setup on network that will not be
connected to the company wan. They have a sattelite broadband connection
that connects back to the joint venture company office and also out to
the internet, a split tunnel. The clients use cisco vpn software to
connect back to the wan when they need use resources on it.

The problem (I believe it to be the problem at the moment) is there are
no dns servers on the local side of the link, the first dns server is
located on the far side of the sattelite connection, at the joint
venture companies office - a 700ms ping response is what I get from it.
The other two dns servers are just isp dns.

The machines print locally and find it slows down quite often when
printing to the ip network printers, located locally on the same
switch/subnet ... im thinking its the dns over the link but dont have
much experience of not having a DC or server of any kind on the site.

What could I put in to cache and hand out local dns - budget doesnt
allow for a real server.

A hosts file was mentioned but ive no experience of those and not sure
if it would affect printing to the local ip network printer on the same
switch ... the network printer doesnt have a name, simply an ip address
so thats where im confused at the moment as to why the machine would
slow down - is it lookups for their own ip address? - I guess if they
were made static and used a hosts file to give details of their own
ip's?

Does a hosts file get looked at before dns?

 

[Kevin D. Goodknecht Sr. [MVP]]

We have a remote site, which is setup on network that will not be
connected to the company wan. They have a sattelite broadband
connection that connects back to the joint venture company office and
also out to the internet, a split tunnel. The clients use cisco vpn
software to connect back to the wan when they need use resources on
it.

The problem (I believe it to be the problem at the moment) is there
are no dns servers on the local side of the link, the first dns
server is located on the far side of the sattelite connection, at the
joint venture companies office - a 700ms ping response is what I get
from it. The other two dns servers are just isp dns.

The machines print locally and find it slows down quite often when
printing to the ip network printers, located locally on the same
switch/subnet ... im thinking its the dns over the link but dont have
much experience of not having a DC or server of any kind on the site.

What could I put in to cache and hand out local dns - budget doesnt
allow for a real server.

You could install Bind-PE on a Workstation if you don't have a server on the
remote site and use it for DNS by all other WS at the site.

A hosts file was mentioned but ive no experience of those and not sure
if it would affect printing to the local ip network printer on the
same switch ... the network printer doesnt have a name, simply an ip
address so thats where im confused at the moment as to why the
machine would slow down - is it lookups for their own ip address? - I
guess if they were made static and used a hosts file to give details
of their own ip's?

How much memory does the printer have?
When you print anything, until the entire document being printed is uploaded
to the printer's cache, computer performance is greatly degraded. Adding
memory to the printer increases the size/number of documents that the
printer can cache, which decreases the time it takes to upload documents to
the printer.

Does a hosts file get looked at before dns?

Anything in the HOSTS file is loaded into the DNS Client cache and won't go
to DNS. Keep in mind Nslookup bypasses the DNS Client cache so you cannot
test it with Nslookup.

 

[m0rk]

You could install Bind-PE on a Workstation if you don't have a server on the
remote site and use it for DNS by all other WS at the site.

Ive installed it to my local machine to have a look at - thanks.

How much memory does the printer have?
When you print anything, until the entire document being printed is uploaded
to the printer's cache, computer performance is greatly degraded. Adding
memory to the printer increases the size/number of documents that the
printer can cache, which decreases the time it takes to upload documents to
the printer.

I think it was 256mb, its a kyocera fsc8008n a3 colour laser - it seemed
to speed up once id updated the drivers to the current kx driver and set
the driver to same settings as printer, think it was pclx, rather than
kdpl

So, if the printer has enough memory and is on the local network, same
ip range, same switch ... would the workstation need to use dns at all
during the printing process?

Anything in the HOSTS file is loaded into the DNS Client cache and won't go
to DNS. Keep in mind Nslookup bypasses the DNS Client cache so you cannot
test it with Nslookup.

So, if it turns out I have dns issues then reserving the ip's for the
clients in dhcp and putting them into a hosts file should improve local
performance, only if dns is an issue.

How can I test for when machines use dns and for what tasks?

 

[James W. Long]

nope, not at all. the clients would print thru a local port that is an ip
address on the same subnet.
the data would go straight to it.
James.