I need to make two things abundantly clear from the outset. First, despite its name, the WINS does not work over the internet; it only works internally. Secondly, do not deploy WINS if you have DNS. Even Microsoft recommends this course of action. This is because WINS is a legacy service. However, it is one of the exam objectives, so we need to discuss it.
WINS is similar to DNS in that it resolves names to IP addresses; however, it deals with NetBIOS names, rather than an FQDN. The NetBIOS is, in essence, the hostname on its own, that is, without a domain, TLD, or root. This format is known as a single-label, unqualified domain name. Like DNS, a server that's called a WINS server needs to be available.
There are certain steps that need to be performed to configure a host to use WINS. We will discuss this in the upcoming sections.
