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PC name/IP address resolution?

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6 replies

by ballyb

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Scenario..
I have PC Anywhere (ver 9.x) on my office PC and am dialing into a client's PC (s) with PC Anywhere, on a nearby Trading floor. Sometimes I type in the name of the PC, as it is easier to remember; we have a Win 2000 domain, all TCP/IP, not sure if Active Directory is fully implemented, and in this case I was going from one Win 2000 PC to another.
Question: am I using DNS to resolve the host name to the IP address (in this case with PC Any)? Or am I using WINS or some kind of NetBios?

Any help/clarification would be appreciated...

6 replies

by saihib

You are probably using DNS. One way to check is to run ipconfig /all from a command prompt. Active Directory doesn't have anything to do with name resolution and if this is an all Win2K network it's very unlikely that you're using WINS. ipconfig will tell you what's happening.

by ageranger10

You are actually using broadcasts with UDP packets to locate the host you're trying to connect to. This from Symantec's KB: When the pcAnywhere remote browses for hosts, it sends out User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets and waits for a pcAnywhere host to respond. Hosts that respond appear in the TCP/IP browse list.

Hosts that fail to respond may do so for a number of different reasons, including the following:

Host is not waiting
Host is on a different subnet
There is too much network traffic
There are packet collisions
The host is across a Wide Area Network (WAN) link.

I use ver 9.2 at work and I've found an old-fashioned hosts file actually speeds up connection time from not having to to the broadcasts.

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