P
Philip Inglesant
I can't believe this hasn't been raised before, but several hours of
searching has failed to bring to light exactly what I want.
I have a small home LAN with three PC's running all Windows XP Professional.
I want to be able to share printers (and sometimes files) between them.
Pretty normal and rather basic, but I DON'T want to use NetBIOS over TCP/IP.
Why not? Well, it's insecure, it's ancient, and I just don't want to have to
be stuck in the dark ages of computing, and I shouldn't have to be.
Now, as I understand it, forgive me if I have mis-understood, but Win XP and
other recent versions of Windows don't have to use NetBIOS for name
resolution, because they use DNS:
"DNS is the name resolution service of Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows
Server 2003. Windows clients use DNS for name resolution and service
location, including locating Active Directory domain controllers for logon.
" -
Windows Server 2003 Technical Reference > Technologies Collections >
Networking Collection.
Now, this is a bit ambiguous, but reading between the lines it seems to
imply that DNS in Windows XP etc. is closely linked with Active Directory.
Which is rather bad news if, like me, you are only running XP and not
Windows Server. Am I correct in thinking that AD _server_ is NOT a part of
Win XP professional?
I also have a Netgear DG834GT ADSL firewall/router. This provides DHCP to
configure all the PCs around the LAN with non-routable IP addresses, as well
as acting as a DNS server for them. However, as far as I can see, it doesn't
update the DNS name associated with the IP addresses it allocates around the
LAN. If it is doing this, then it doesn't seem to be telling ME what is in
its DNS (if I use nslookup to query it).
This DG834GT does support "DynamicDNS", but not in the way I mean - it
supports using a dynamic DNS service so that the rest of the Internet can
find it and other things. This is not what I want - I don't want the
Internet to be able to see me, I want my computers to be able to see ONE
ANOTHER.
So, what this comes down to is that:
- in theory, Win XP /2000?/Server 2003 don't actually NEED NetBIOS, however,
- in practice, as far as I can see, a Win XP-only LAN DOES need to use
NetBIOS because otherwise the PCs around the LAN have no way to find one
another, since, it seems to me, there is no way other than Active Directory
(or something equivalent) that their IP addresses can be added to the DNS,
so there is no way that other computers on the LAN can find them.
Just to be clear, I am NOT talking about looking up DNS records on the
Internet DNS - this works fine, computers on the LAN use the gateway as
their (DHCP-allocated) DNS server, the gateway does DNS look-ups out to the
Internet. What I want to be able to do, as well as this, is use my local DNS
server to look up PCs with their local IP addresses - and, obviously, I
don't want the rest of the Internet to access these local IP addresses and
local names.
Have I missed something? Is there a simple way round this?
--- Philip
searching has failed to bring to light exactly what I want.
I have a small home LAN with three PC's running all Windows XP Professional.
I want to be able to share printers (and sometimes files) between them.
Pretty normal and rather basic, but I DON'T want to use NetBIOS over TCP/IP.
Why not? Well, it's insecure, it's ancient, and I just don't want to have to
be stuck in the dark ages of computing, and I shouldn't have to be.
Now, as I understand it, forgive me if I have mis-understood, but Win XP and
other recent versions of Windows don't have to use NetBIOS for name
resolution, because they use DNS:
"DNS is the name resolution service of Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows
Server 2003. Windows clients use DNS for name resolution and service
location, including locating Active Directory domain controllers for logon.
" -
Windows Server 2003 Technical Reference > Technologies Collections >
Networking Collection.
Now, this is a bit ambiguous, but reading between the lines it seems to
imply that DNS in Windows XP etc. is closely linked with Active Directory.
Which is rather bad news if, like me, you are only running XP and not
Windows Server. Am I correct in thinking that AD _server_ is NOT a part of
Win XP professional?
I also have a Netgear DG834GT ADSL firewall/router. This provides DHCP to
configure all the PCs around the LAN with non-routable IP addresses, as well
as acting as a DNS server for them. However, as far as I can see, it doesn't
update the DNS name associated with the IP addresses it allocates around the
LAN. If it is doing this, then it doesn't seem to be telling ME what is in
its DNS (if I use nslookup to query it).
This DG834GT does support "DynamicDNS", but not in the way I mean - it
supports using a dynamic DNS service so that the rest of the Internet can
find it and other things. This is not what I want - I don't want the
Internet to be able to see me, I want my computers to be able to see ONE
ANOTHER.
So, what this comes down to is that:
- in theory, Win XP /2000?/Server 2003 don't actually NEED NetBIOS, however,
- in practice, as far as I can see, a Win XP-only LAN DOES need to use
NetBIOS because otherwise the PCs around the LAN have no way to find one
another, since, it seems to me, there is no way other than Active Directory
(or something equivalent) that their IP addresses can be added to the DNS,
so there is no way that other computers on the LAN can find them.
Just to be clear, I am NOT talking about looking up DNS records on the
Internet DNS - this works fine, computers on the LAN use the gateway as
their (DHCP-allocated) DNS server, the gateway does DNS look-ups out to the
Internet. What I want to be able to do, as well as this, is use my local DNS
server to look up PCs with their local IP addresses - and, obviously, I
don't want the rest of the Internet to access these local IP addresses and
local names.
Have I missed something? Is there a simple way round this?
--- Philip