[DHCP] RE: Determining request

[Simon Hobson]

Jonathan Lassoff wrote:

>I believe Tim is correct here, you can set a DHCP option to advertise a
>WINS server that will have to point at something that can do name
>resolution for your Windows clients.  This way, you can make your
>Windows hosts use unicast IP to resolve names and talk to each other
>instead of subnet-local broadcast UDP.


James Dinkel wrote:

>Oops, if this is accurate: 
>http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/network/wins/winsinfo/index.xml.ID=Browsing
>It looks like you will still not be able to browse computers across 
>subnets even with WINS.  But as I said, I personally would prefer to 
>not have that functionality anyway.  And since WINS is a deprecated 
>technology, that's further motivation to just stick with DNS.

Odd. At my last job I had exactly the setup Jonathan mentions, and it 
"just worked" - you opened your browser and there were the workgroups 
for the other sites. OK it was slow as we only had 64k links, but it 
worked exactly the same as for just the local site.

Now I've not been involved in that side of networking for a few 
years, so I'm not too familiar with AD etc. However, as I understand 
it, in an AD setup, as machines connect to the network, they will 
populate the DNS and other machines can find them via that - ie they 
don't rely on broadcasts to find other machines. But I could be wrong 
there.

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Simon Hobson

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