any way to use sites for non Active Directory searches?

  • Thread starter Thread starter David Curwin
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D

David Curwin

We have a Windows 2003 domain, with Windows 98 and Windows XP
workstations.

In order to use use Novell Zenworks, we've installed the Zenworks
Agent on the workstations. Without getting into detail about the agent
(and I'm not interested in changing how the agent works), basically
when installing the Agent, I enter either an IP address or a DNS name.
The computer then tries to log in to the ZEN server at the
address/name that I've submitted. I can't enter more than one name.

My organization has sites in a number of different cities. I would
like to configure the login to the ZEN servers in such away that by
default the user would log in to the server in the same site as him,
but if that server was unavailable - he would log in automatically to
any other available server. This is obviously similar to the way that
the users currently log in to the DCs in the domain.

The only caveat is that I want to do this without changing any
settings on the workstations, like routing tables, host files, etc.
Also, it's important to note that my servers are on different subnets
than the workstations.

After trying to research this for a while, the only thing I came up
with was to try to use the site topology that already exists in my DNS
servers (Active-Directory integrated, btw). But I don't know if it's
possible to have a relatively dumb application that simply looks for
an A record to actually look for an SRV record in a site. Is it
somehow possible to do this on the server side?

Thanks,

Dave
 
This is more of an AD question than a DNS question.

Unfortuanately, I don't see a way to make the client agent discern Sites in
AD unless either you create some sort of script to "read" the site based on
the IP, or you probably can go a step further with a 3rd party tool to synch
it up, but assuming that you're not using Novell NDS, then not sure how that
will work for you because the different synch tools are all LDAP based.

Try posting this in the AD group.

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Regards,
Ace

Please direct all replies to the newsgroup so all can benefit.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties.

Ace Fekay, MCSE 2000, MCSE+I, MCSA, MCT, MVP
Microsoft Windows MVP - Active Directory
 
DC> I don't know if it's possible to have a relatively dumb
DC> application that simply looks for an A record to actually
DC> look for an SRV record in a site. Is it somehow possible
DC> to do this on the server side?

No. The application must be changed to lookup the "SRV" resource records, if
that is really what you want. (It won't actually achieve your real goal. The
DNS is not a mechanism for distributing load to the closest service server.
Use "anycast" routing for that.)
 
Net mask ordering within DNS may help. What this does is that if the response the DNS server is sending to the client includes an IP address that is on the
same subnet as the client, this IP will be at the top of the list. The client will then use this first entry initially as the IP to connect to. So what you'd do, is configure
a name that includes all the IP addresses of your Zen servers. Point the Zen client to this name. As long as there is a Zen server on the same IP subnet as a
client making the request, the DNS server will return that IP first in the list and the client will most likely go to that server first. This may not always work and if the
client and Zen server aren't on the same subnet, then of course round robin will take over.

Thank you,
Mike Johnston
Microsoft Network Support

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MJM> As long as there is a Zen[works] server on the same IP
MJM> subnet as a client making the request, [...]

He did explicitly say in the post that you are replying to that this wasn't
the case.
 
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