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Through my research I have read that jetpack.exe is used to do something with databases (database on a WINS server?). I'm assuming maybe it can be used to clear old data?

In short the issue that we are having is that in the domain we control, I gave a server (4 actually) another hostname but kept its same static IP address info, etc. I went into DNS and AD and removed the old hostname information and ensured the new was there. If we ping or try to remote however the old hostname it returns a DNS suffix that is on our corporate side. (We have our domain and a trust with the corporate domain).

I am assuming that we are getting a ping from an upstream WINS server. Someone stated in an e-mail that since we do not have control of that server we can either wait for this to hopefully be automatically "cleaned up"... remove WINS from our domain since we don't have a WINS server we control anyway... or ask the corporate side to jetpack their WINS server. Could anyone please explain what exactly the jetpack.exe does and how this can clear old data if that's what it is doing?

Patrick
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Jetpacke.exe is typically used just to compress a WINS/DHCP Jet database (pack the jet database - jetpack :) ). It can also be used to defrag the database, before and after compressions, but it won't clear out messy records or misconfigured DNS settings for you.

I would recommend taking a close looks at your DNS tables and setup and ensuring everything is solid and setup properly. If everything checks out on your end, then I would try to gather as much information as you can on the external setup and add that info to your question here.

Univ426
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Jet is the database engine used by some Microsoft products, such as WINS and early versions of Access (I don't know what they use now). Jetpack is a utility to pack a Jet database, which involves removing all the empty space that has accumulated. This is desirable because Jet is an extremely crude flat-file database that doesn't remove deleted entries. They are simply marked as deleted but the disk space is still consumed. When the file is packed it's essentially just read and live entries are written out to a new file, skipping over those marked as deleted. This is how many databases operated 40 or more years ago.

John Gardeniers
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    As of Office 2010 Access could still use a version of JET on the backend; the wiki hasn't been updated for office 2012 yet so it's possible something has changed since then. I can't find when it was first offered; but at least since Access 2003, Access applications can be configured to use to SQL Server instead of JET as the data store. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Jet_Database_Engine#History – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight Aug 23 '12 at 19:08
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    @Dan, I know Jet was used at least as far back as Access 95. – John Gardeniers Aug 24 '12 at 00:19