Campus WINS Servers

What is WINS?

WINS is the Windows Internet Naming System, a service provided for Microsoft networking clients connected to the campus network. It is roughly equivalent in function to the domain name system (DNS), but is strictly for Microsoft network clients. WINS permits machines on the campus network to discover each other for peer-to-peer or client-server communications purposes while running Microsoft's network protocol, NetBeui, over TCP/IP.

WINS Benefits

In early versions of Windows for Workgroups and Windows NT, Microsoft's network stack relied upon broadcasts and multicasts to discover other Microsoft client machines connected to the local network segment. This was not a terribly wise strategy for large networks for two principle reasons: 1) broadcasts and multicasts in significant quantities (say a hundred machines) can easily saturate bridged networks such as ours and 2) broadcasts and multicase are generally not propagated through routers, effectively isolating client communications to a specific network segment. Microsoft's solution to these difficulties was the introduction of NetBeui over TCP/IP and the advent of WINS servers to provide client location services in place of the broadcast discovery mechanism.

With WINS, when your machine is first connected to the network, it will register itself with all known WINS servers. The WINS servers store this information and provide it to any clients who ask for the names of machines currently connected to the network. When your machine is shutdown, it will contact the WINS server to unregister itself so others will no longer attempt to connect to it. Effectively, WINS provides a dynamic database of Windows client machines currently connected to the campus network.

Campus WINS Servers

Computing Services currently supports one WINS server for Windows users. This server should be automatically configured by DHCP. However, if you need to configure it manually, the campus server is:

Server Hostname	IP Address
wins.andrew.cmu.edu	128.2.14.3

Broadcast Restrictions

Please note that, due to the broadcast problem, if you are running a Microsoft peer-to-peer networking stack using NetBeui, you are required to use WINS servers for resolution and to turn off broadcast server discovery. If your machine sends out broadcast server discovery messages, it will be disconnected from the campus network to prevent problems. If you have any questions about configuring your client for WINS, please contact the Computing Service Help Center at x8-HELP.