5.9. WINS Forever

As important as WINS has been for many diverse Windows-based networks, the WINS service on NT 4.0 is not something that we look back on fondly, and for many with thousands of users spread over dozens of subnets, it has been more a case of WINS and "LOSSES."

Although WINS offered a measure of fault-tolerance on small intranets, it often let us down on large networks, losing connections, missing replication with its peers, and collecting garbage that needed to be manually deleted from the database. Often, intra-domain communications between sites would break down because records were not updated and the clients could not succeed with connections to critical services in other domains. Many network managers pleaded with Microsoft to rebuild the WINS service, and Microsoft did so with Windows 2000 Server. Thus WINS continues to be an integral and important "feature" of Windows Server 2008.