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The Domain Name System on Windows NT

The Windows NT 3.5 resource kit includes a free implementation of the Internet Domain Name System (DNS). DNS is similar in function to the Windows Internet Naming Service (WINS), the main difference between them is that DNS was not designed to work with dynamic host configuration protocols such as DHCP. DNS databases are static, entries are added manually by a system administrator, necessitating a restart of the DNS server.

This is a problem for two classes of hosts:

Dial-up hosts where, due to local addressing limitations, a dynamic IP addressing scheme is used.

Nomadic hosts, which may connect to the ‘network’ from different nodes.

Obviously this is only a problem for clients performing name or address lookups but it does rather preclude such hosts running globally accessible Internet services, such as a Web server. In other words if you run Internet services within this environment there is no way for clients to find the IP address of your machine.