Mail replication problem - DNS related?????

[andrew12]

Hello,

we are experiencing a problem with XP clients dialling in to replicate mail.

It appeared that the problem was IP related as immediately after establishing a dial up connection and failing to replicate, we tried getting them to ping a few ip addresses which responded after about a minute.

However when we brought up the properties of the connection we could see that no packets whatsoever were being transmitted during this time. Once information was sent a ping was returned immediately.

After messing around disabling various network cards and infrared adaptors we happened to try stopping the client dns service. This had an immediate effect. XP users were able to replicate straight away. If we restarted the service the problem re-occurred immediately.

This is fine as a work around but as we are planning on implementing active directory it is not a long-term solution.

Does anyone have any experience of a similar problem or have any suggestions on how we should proceed?

 

[bcastner]

What you want to do is to chance the cache resolving behavior, and stop the caching of negative responses.

1. Change: The DNS Client Service Does Not Revert to Using the First Server in the List.

Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Dnscache\Parameters

Value: ServerPriorityTimeLimit
Data type: REG_DWORD
Range: 0x0 to 0xFFFFFFFF seconds

If you set this value to 0 (zero), the server priorities will be reset before the Client service decides with DNS server to use. Therefore, the DNS server that is configured first will be attempted first on each query.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;286834

2. Change: Do not cache negative responses.

Key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Dnscache\Parameters

Value name: MaxNegativeCacheTtl
Data type: REG_DWORD
Default: 900 seconds
Value data: Set the value to 0 if you do not want negative responses to be cached.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;318803