Using WINS Lookup and WINS Reverse Lookup
What’s WINS lookup good for? In most networks, not a lot. For one thing, Windows Server 2003 integrates tightly with DNS so that in a properly configured network, all Windows hosts have forward- and reverse-mapping information in DNS. (More information about this new integration with DNS is found in Chapter 8.) But let’s say you still have a lot of older Windows hosts on your network. Do you need WINS lookup? Well, we still can’t get excited about it. Think about it this way: the names that get resolved the most are the servers, and they usually have fixed IP addresses and thus static DNS entries. They’re resolved directly in DNS, not via the WINS lookup detour. Most networks don’t have much peer-to-peer networking; your average desktop host usually doesn’t offer network services, such as a web server, name server, and so on. It’s the need to reach those kinds of network services that requires DNS name resolution to work for every host. (Sure, there’s a lot of NetBIOS-based file and print sharing among desktop hosts, but that process uses WINS natively.)
If you do need to support WINS lookup in your network, a big problem with it is that the standard BIND name server doesn’t support it.[5] Many people find that they need WINS lookup after they have a DNS infrastructure in place using BIND name servers. One option is to replace all those name servers with the Microsoft DNS Server and enable WINS lookup. That’s not realistic for most people. ...
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