Folks,

I hoping someone out there can help us understand how we can setup a network "backchannel" in an NT domain environment. Here's the situation:

One NT domain that has approximately 20 servers in it. Of those, 8 are IIS servers. The HTML content, dynamically created and accessed by anonymous web users, is stored on 2 F740's. Right now, all the servers, domain controllers, SQL servers, and the filers are on one subnet. The filers are accessed by dlls on the IIS systems using UNC - \filername\dir1\dir2\websitename. The filername part of that path conforms to the hostname given the filer in the NT domain; the websitename part if dynamically created when the anonymous web user creates a web site.

What I want to do is have the filers connect to the IIS systems, and only the IIS systems, on a second subnet to maximize bandwidth and isolate the file access traffic from other traffic. However, I cannot seem to get around the fact that NT wants to take the UNC pathing and do a name resolution through WINS; and WINS does not like 2 network addresses for the same host. NT does not seem to handle the idea that allows name resolution by NIC, something easy to setup on the filer and in UNIX. When we have tried this, the IIS systems seem to ignore lmhost files where we have put the second filer NIC name and address, routes a call to WINS, then finally seems to find the second subnet when WINS fails to. We have tried putting the IP address of the second NIC in the UNC call, but NT treats it as a string, so no go. BTW, the IIS servers do have a second NIC card on the backchannel switch that we connect the second filer NIC to.

Help?

Sam Schorr Homestead Technologies ph: (650) 549-3152 fax: (650) 364-7329 sschorr@homestead.com

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