"you will see traffic trying to find things like pc1234.com as it works"
That will only happen if pc1234 does not exist in your search domain, but since it does on your domain which would be the first search you would not see traffic for pc1234.com ;)
And I don't agree that \pc1234 would fail some of the time - either they would fail all of the time.. Why would thy fail only part of the time?
Just sniff your traffic to see what happens.. Any windows box over 2k would be able to use direct host smb, would it not - which is dns based. So as long as you have a search string setup then you would find your boxes via dns and then connect to the share on 445
so I disabled netbios over tcp, on my box other it would just broadcast for the names first and since im currently only on one segment would not be a valid test.
So I turned it off, then cleared both netbios cache and dns cache, fired up wireshark and then run \p4-28g and connects just fine.. From the sniff you clearly see the dns resolution happen to the FQDN
There are many ways to skin a cat, and sure running a wins server to allow for file sharing across segments for name resolution, but it is not the only way.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/204279
Direct hosting of SMB over TCP/IP
I am not saying that you might not still need to run or want to run wins or some other NBNS, some legacy type software might still require it, etc. But in general just because you have multiple segments does not mean you can not just access \computername - all that you need to work out is name resolution.
you will notice my queries go over ipv6, but that just because I am using ipv6 on that client so it likes ipv6 over ipv4, but as you see the returned address is ipv4 address, since that client does not have ipv6 enabled.
directhostsmbdns.jpg
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