Introduction

One of the most important network services in use on any network today is name resolution. How can you translate the cryptic hardware address of a network host to something intuitive that will allow an end user to access his or her resources? Asking someone to map a drive to 00-10-B5-06-25-21 or 10.10.111.24 is probably not going to go over too well.

As the industry recognized this problematic issue, several solutions were designed to allow users to utilize easy-to-remember names instead of the hard-to-remember addresses. Microsoft's contribution to this effort was the Windows Internet Name Service (WINS), which allowed Windows systems using NetBIOS to discover system names by using broadcasts. WINS was later scaled to support larger TCP/IP-based networks. The other major designer of name resolution solutions was the Unix/Internet community, which needed a dynamic way to resolve addresses on what would eventually become the Internet. This community's answer was DNS, which was actually designed and implemented before WINS.

As the popularity of the Internet grew, it became evident that the Internet's solution for name resolution was becoming the predominant solution, and in the latest version of the Windows operating system, Microsoft has further improved its support for DNS.

Note: More on WINS

We spend Chapter 4, "Implementing and Managing WINS," looking at WINS and learning how it is installed, configured, and maintained.