Sysadmins help!

[Chuckles]

Consider this scenario

You have 2 file servers on 2 different sites.

Site A is the main production site and houses ServerA
Site B is a remote office and houses ServerB

The file store for images/PDF's etc is duplicated in the following locations

Site A - \\ServerA\Data\
Site B - \\ServerB\Data\

When users in each site work in Quark, inDesign etc their images are all linked in through their local server as the WAN between the 2 is ****.

That all works fine but you've got a script running in site A on ServerC that polls a folder for "Completed" documents and saves out an EPS.

For files on Site A, this is fine because it's only ever looking locally, but the links are hardcoded (and can't be changed) into the documents, so when Site B submits, they are being pulled in across the WAN and taking an age to build.

I thought a quick and simple fix would be to use an entry in the host file on Server C to map the netbios name of server B to the IP address of Server A.

It doesn't work because if you try and access the shares from Server C you get "Access Denied the Target name of the server is incorrect".

I assume this is because Server A knows not to listen clients trying to access shares under the netbios name of Server B

Is there a way to achieve this?

Thanks

[Garp]

Geographic based DNS resolution?

You can do that with split horizons in BIND. Internally we'll take a different route to access certain servers, or temporarily redirect traffic to a different box to public based on the IP address of the workstation.

[Mark]

This is Windows we're talking about. :p

However, the idea is reasonable - if you can make name resolution site-specific then give both A and B the same internal name.

[Chuckles]

They are both on the same domain though, I don't think it will allow it?

[Burble]

I assume this is because Server A knows not to listen clients trying to access shares under the netbios name of Server

Correct.

On server B go to HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServe r\Parameters and create a DWORD called DisableStrictNameChecking and give it a decimal value of 1. Reboot.

[Chuckles]

Tried that this morning but without the reboot after a bit of googling (it's in production).

Thanks, hopefully that will fix :D

[Chuckles]

Do you mean Server B or server A? Server A is the one that needs to accept shares on a different name.

[Burble]

Sorry, yeah, server A. It won't take effect until after a reboot.

[Chuckles]

Thanks but it didn't work (dialed in and did a sneaky reboot). Same as before "The Target account name is incorrect" :(

[Burble]

Hmm, that isn't an error I've seen before now that I come to think of it, normally you'll get 'the network path was not found' wit this sort of thing.

I'll have another think.

[Chuckles]

Cheers. I also tried entering the other name in the string OptionalNames in the same reg key.

[Chuckles]

OK this is wierd.

nbtstat -a serveraname gives host not found, yet it pings to the IP in the host file fine :confused:

[Burble]

nbtstat only looks at DNS I think, not the hosts file.

[Chuckles]

Surely it should resolve to the "True" IP then and see the server?

[Burble]

Ah yeah, I see what you're getting at. It should. Does it make any difference if you use the FQDN?

[Chuckles]

No :(

[Mark]

Found this, which contains some useful background stuff:

http://www.sans.org/security-resources/idfaq/nbt-netbios.php

The last point is particularly salient here. Do you have the required services enabled? nbtstat uses NBNS, not DNS.