LMHosts question

Hi all.
I have WinXP at the office, in a Win2000 domain.
To ease a bit on the DNS queries, I placed some entries in the LMHosts file, with the most common servers addresses' inside.
A friend of mine than came and told me that the LMHosts file is the last to be checked in order to find the server to connect to. That's quite the opposite from what I remember, that the LMHosts file is the first to be checked, thus those entries are indeed of some help.
Q: who's right? What's the order of checking the address for any host on the net?

TIA.

 

LMHosts will be the 2nd file to be checked. Hosts is first.

It sounds like you are just using the 'hosts' features of LMHosts though unless you are also pre-loading some domain info. If that is the case, better to just use the hosts file.

 

10nx, Newt. Looks like I was right after all.

 

Be aware of potential problems with entries in "hosts" file

Just wanted to point out that it is easy to forget that these entries in the "hosts" file have been made and remind that if a server changes its IP address, which happens from time to time, it will no longer be accessible until the "hosts" file is updated. So if one does this, for oneself or more importantly for someone else, it is important to remind them that if e.g. a year later a particular Internet host becomes inaccessible, the first thing to do is to do a DNS lookup and compare the result with the entry in the "hosts" file. I speak from experience.

 

Good point. If there is a hosts entry, nothing else will be checked by the system so bad in hosts = won't find it. If nothing in hosts, a bad LMHosts entry will do the same because after a match is found there, the networking software won't continue looking.

 

Good point indeed. What I did is to take the issue further: I prepared a central HOSTS file on one of the DCs, and make all the stations I have (some 100 of them) to search in that file. Thus, whenever I have to make a change, I won't have to do it on every comp itself, but on the central file.
Thank you for your responses.