Best Practices

Keeping various services working well together is often a matter of dealing with their internal problems rather than their shared elements. This section provides basic practices to help interoperability.

Consolidate Subnets

When you have multiple subnets in a small remote office, consider consolidating the office to one subnet address. You can do this using asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switching or a virtual private network (VPN) configuration. By consolidating to one subnet address, a local broadcast can be used to resolve names before a request must traverse the WAN to contact a WINS server.

Changing the client to M-node allows it to broadcast locally for resources before contacting a WINS server for NetBIOS name resolution. This can help to reduce the overall amount of WINS-associated traffic, especially WAN traffic.

Update Older Clients

Update client computers running Windows for Workgroups that use the Microsoft TCP/IP-32 protocol stack to the latest Vredir and Vserver files. These files are located on the Windows NT Server 4.0 compact disc (revision 3.11b).