Do I need WINS?

  • Thread starter Thread starter mismomma
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mismomma

I have heard, in reality, WINS is likely to be needed in
AD even thought the documentation says it's not.

I'm installing AD shortly in Native Mode. If all clients
are W2K and later, do we need WINS for anything?

Currently we have WINS, but I don't want to forward to
WINS if it's not necessary.
 
Without WINS you wont be able to browse Network Neighbourhood which may or
me not be a problem for you. Also watch out if you have a Microsoft cluster
that uses NetBIOS cluster names. Other than that, with no downlevel clients
or servers you should (in theory) be able to do without WINS. It wont hurt
to have it around for a transition period afterwards and the service can
then be disabled rather than uninstalled, just to keep yourself covered!
 
I have heard, in reality, WINS is likely to be needed in
AD even thought the documentation says it's not.

I'm installing AD shortly in Native Mode. If all clients
are W2K and later, do we need WINS for anything?

Currently we have WINS, but I don't want to forward to
WINS if it's not necessary.
Click to expand...
************* REPLY SEPARATER ***************
WINS is a protocol that Microsoft is abandoning along with NETBEUI. I
personally have never found it useful or necessary. LMHOSTS on the other hand
has been very useful, but Microsoft does not enable it by default on XP.
 
I have a customer running cisco VPN client to office. VPN
client doesn't pass broadcast traffic. From the document
and practice, it seems that they can't browse network
places even if it win2k or XP. So it looks like browsing
network places needs broadcast or WINS...
 
In
John Coutts said:
************* REPLY SEPARATER ***************
WINS is a protocol that Microsoft is abandoning along with NETBEUI. I
personally have never found it useful or necessary. LMHOSTS on the
other hand has been very useful, but Microsoft does not enable it by
default on XP.
Click to expand...

However, John, I would like to point out, and not sure of the original
poster's network requirements and configuration, if a client requires
Network Neighborhood functionality, or if they are using proprietary
application that requires NetBIOS, and the network is an enterprise
environment (multi subnets or locations), then it's difficult to get rid of
WINS until a different app is found that doesn;t require NetBIOS or the use
of Network Neighborhood is no longer needed.

Albeit, you can get to a UNC using a computer name without NetBIOS since
Windows 2000 now uses direct host SMB connections which is essentially a
netbiosless connection for SMB and works across port 445. But some
applications and Network Neighborhood requires it.

--
Regards,
Ace

Please direct all replies to the newsgroup so all can benefit.

Ace Fekay, MCSE 2000, MCSE+I, MCSA, MCT, MVP
Microsoft Windows MVP - Active Directory
 
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