From: "Henry Sieff" <hsieffORTHODON.COM>
To: <FOCUS-MSSECURITYFOCUS.COM>

> Hosts: maps friendly names to IP addresses (obviated by DNS, DDNS, and
> WINS)
[...]
> Lmhosts: like hosts, but allows some NT specific features (obviated by
> WINS in a large network or DDNS in Wni2K
[...]
> Services: maps TCP/UDP services to their standard port number
>
> Now, NT doesn't use any of this for anything. It exists for the sake
> of *X apps ported to NT, which would look for them (for example, if
> the people who ported NMAP to NT had wanted to, they could've used the
> Services file instead of their own services file.)

Mistake.

etc\services is used by _some_ WinNT services and client tools to determine
port bind to (see Q173903, Q130289,
http://www.microsoft.com/TechNet/iis/custom.asp and other places).
Unfortunately very few services seems to use it, so you cannot relay on it.

etc\lmhosts is used as static IP mapping for NetBIOS resolution, it's well
documented in WinNT Resource Kit and other places (see Q102725, Q119493,
Q150800)

etc\hosts is used for hostname resolution, before checking "real" DNS. It's
useful in many situations: when you have static NAT and public IP in not
accessible from protected network, if you are using resolving particular
hostname very often and want to spare some CPU cycles on DNS server, or if
you want to run simple services/network without DNS server (see Q115496,
Q102908, Q142309, other places)

Rgds

B.

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