Using DNS Aliases to Access Servers

[Joel D. Kraft]

I am in the process of trying to add an extra layer of indirection
into our printing services to allow us to transparently move
printers from one server to another because of normal replacement
or failure. In the file sharing world, this was very easy to do
with DFS, and it would certiainly be nice to have some equivalent
for printing.

In the absence of that, the most logical solution we could find for
this problem was to use DNS CNAME records to create virtual print
server hostnames, and then point those records to the actual servers.
This has not worked out quite as nicely as we had hoped, and I am
investigating a couple of scenarios.

The first scenario is when NetBIOS over TCP/IP is enabled. Here,
the server only seems to like the connection when the first portion
of the hostname is exactly the same as the NetBIOS name of the
computer OR if I use the IP address. If I try to connect using
the CNAME, I get a network path not found error. This doesn't seem
to match the behavior that I would expect from my reading. If
the names do not match, I would expect the client to do a host
query (nbtstat -A) and connect using the NetBIOS name it finds.
The other option would be to connect to the generic *SMBSERVER.
Neither of these two things appears to be hapening.

Is there a way to force it to try to connect to *SMBSERVER? There
is a registry setting to cause this to happen under Windows NT
(Q137565), but I cannot find an eqivalent for WinXP or Win2003.
Is there any other advice to get this to work?

I'm more confused about the second scenario, though! We have a
couple of computers where NetBIOS over TCP/IP is disabled in
order to test direct SMB between the machines. Basically the
situation did not improve, although I would expect this scenario
to be much more forgiving if the NetBIOS name didn't match the
DNS name, because there there isn't any NetBIOS at all. How does
this differ from the first scenario?

Thanks,
Joel (jdk6 at case dot edu)

Joel D. Kraft
Case Western Reserve University

 

[Doug Sherman [MVP]]

Historically the multiple NetBIOS name solution has not worked for printing.
See:

http://www.winnetmag.com/Article/ArticleID/14475/14475.html

Don't know whether you can make it work with DNS Aliases. However, to the
extent that your concern is print device failure as distinguished from
server failure, printer pooling may provide a partial solution. See:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...ndard/proddocs/en-us/sag_printconcepts_13.asp

Doug Sherman
MCSE Win2k/NT4.0, MCSA, MCP+I, MVP

 

[Joel D. Kraft]

Historically the multiple NetBIOS name solution has not worked for
printing.
See:
http://www.winnetmag.com/Article/ArticleID/14475/14475.html

Yeah, I could probably accept that. But these two machines I am using
for testing do NOT have NetBIOS enabled, so I'm wondering why there
would be any restriction like this.

I came across another knowledgebase article Q281308, which describes
the DisableStrictNameChecking for the server service. When I do
this, I do get one step closer. I am able to browse the machine
using the alias, but you still can't actually connect to a printer.

The reason I got onto this kick in the first place, besides that it
is just a plain good idea which is consistent with the rest of our
network setup for services that may move between servers, is that
it is basically described in Q870911. This is an article on how to
consolidate a print server in Win2000 SP4 using CNAMEs for the
servers being replaced.

Thanks,
Joel (jdk6 at case dot edu)

Joel D. Kraft
Case Western Reserve University