Unnecessary Delay in WINS Query (222840)

SYMPTOMS

You are using WINS for name resolution. When a name is not present on the network, it takes several seconds until an error message appears (for example, when typing 'ping WRONGNAME') although your WINS servers are working correctly. When connecting to network resources, you see the following error message:

System error 53 has occurred.

The network path was not found.

RESOLUTION

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Microsoft Windows NT version 4.0. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

152734 How to Obtain the Latest Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article. This problem was first corrected in Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 5.

MORE INFORMATION

When a WINS server gets a query for a name that is not registered in its database, it sends back a negative response indicating the name has not been found. In this case, the Windows NT client with Service Pack 3 or later sends out an additional query to its secondary WINS server for the same name. This behavior has been designed for enhanced reliability when a computer has registered with WINS but the record is not present on the primary WINS server for whatever reason.

However, there is a 1500ms delay for any subsequent queries for the same name. This has been added to prevent overloading a single WINS server. In this special case, the delay does not need to be observed as the second query is sent to a different WINS server.

NOTE: Only when using P-Node as the name resolution method will this delay will be obvious. Other node types use broadcast name resolution, causing additional timeouts.