Network browser that uses DNS instead of NetBIOS?

[Ben Hanson]

Is there such a thing? We have disabled NetBIOS and decommissioned WINS in
our environment, using only DNS for name resolution. Trouble is, old habits
die hard and our users insist that using fully-qualified names or DFS shares
to locate/address resources is "just too hard".

Is there a program that can browse a network using DNS instead of NetBIOS?
Something that we can use to basically replace Network Neighborhood/My
Network Places with?

-Ben


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[Ron Lowe]

Not that I know of.
That's the main reason most people have not actually shut down NetBIOS yet.

I guess someone could write a program to query DNS for all the mcahines in
the same DNS domain that you are in, and present it in a Network
Neighbourhood kind of a way. That would eliminate the broadcasty nature of
browsing. But I know of no such program.

I think it would not scale very well, I can imagine such lists being very
large.
What behaviour would you expect if you were to point such a program at the
..com domain?

It could also include machines which are not PCs, for example, and this
might confuse the user.
Perhaps the program could attempt a connection to the SMB port and report
only those that are reachable by SMB?

I think that the whole concept of browsing the entire network really only
makes sense on a small network, like a single broadcast segment ( I know
domain master browsers have extended that concept to cross-subnet. ).

I'd say either re-enable NetBIOS or forget browsing.