This TechNet article is fantastic, I recommend you bookmark it. It lists the ports used by various Windows services and is quite thorough. In versions of Windows earlier than Vista/2008, NetBIOS was used for the “RPC Locator” service, which managed the RPC name service database. But in Vista/2008 and beyond, the RPC Locator service is … Read more
Microsoft still recommends 15 characters or less. If you give a recent computer a name longer than 15 characters, anything more recent than Windows ME/NT 4.0 will be able to talk to it using the full name. Older than that and you need to truncate to 15 characters. When you are setting a computer name, … Read more
If you don’t have any applications that need it, just take down the WINS server and disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP completely, I’d say. Short names still work just fine in a DNS-only network by virtue of search suffixes. If clients are set to the default NetBIOS setting (enabled except if DHCP says not to), then … Read more
To facilitate failover schemes, a common technique is to use DNS CNAME records (DNS Aliases) for different machine roles. Then instead of changing the Windows computername of the actual machine name, one can switch a DNS record to point to a new host. This can work on Microsoft Windows machines, but to make it work … Read more