Conclusion

The RNR functions might seem overly complicated, but they offer great flexibility in writing client/server applications. The real limitation of name registration lies with the name space. It's rather amazing that even with the popularity of TCP/IP, the only name resolution method available has been DNS, which is not very flexible. With Windows 2000 and the Windows NT domain space, a persistent, protocol-independent method of name resolution is available, offering the necessary flexibility to write robust applications. Additionally, other name spaces (such as SAP) are available for IPX/SPX-based applications, offering many of the same capabilities of NTDS (except for protocol independence).