I seem to recall over the years moves to try to stop the requirement of having a WINS nameservice as part of a Windows environment.
My question is whether sites are still utilizing WINS or have switched over to something else and no longer need WINS. If so, anybody want to share their experiences?
Thanks.
Best Answer
A lot of these answers are only partially true or just plain wrong. WINS is just another way to resolve names to ip addresses. As long as your applications know how to use DNS, WINS is not needed at all.
Edit: Okay, I can't believe how much misinformation there is on this thread. First of all, having different subnets does not necessitate the use of WINS. As long as your application can communicate with udp/tcp port 53 on your DNS server(s), you will be able to resolve hostnames just fine (yes, \\hostname will work too).
Secondly, if you're wondering why you can't resolve anything using the short hostname (i.e. just the hostname without the domain), it's probably because you never configured the default domain (or domain search list) on your clients.
And lastly (but not leastly!), an Active Directory domain is not a prerequisite for using DNS on a Windows network. The only reason you think that is because when you join a machine to a domain, Windows sets the default domain name for you. There is nothing preventing you from setting it yourself through other means (probably DHCP).
So in summary, just set the default domain and use DNS like the rest of us here in the 21st century!