Does everyone know what WINS is? It’s short for the Windows Internet Naming Service. It’s basically a place for machines with NetBios names to register themselves (and their services) and for other machines to look them up. It’s also one of the weakest parts of any NT infrastructure.

Chris Rouland of Lehman Brothers talked about their project to create a stable and functional WINS system. The MS WINS server is based on a JET database and there's no programmatic interface to it. Since Microsoft provides no good tools for managing WINS, if the WINS server crashes and corrupts the database, you either have to restore from tape or wipe the database and start from scratch.

Chris Hertel of the University of Minnesota also outlined his efforts to build a stable and scaleable WINS system.

UofM has a DNS with 40,000 entries and is currently running Samba. When they tried to load the 40,000 DNS entries into Samba's LMHosts file, it took over an hour to launch Samba. They decided to build a back-end database for Samba's nmdb instead.

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