Gentle HP3000 Listers,
 
I would like to thank Yushin and Dave and the others who answered my original
question about this issue.  I am sorry I did not get back to conclude this
earlier, life has been very hectic here in the last 6 weeks  (HP World,
Windows NT Solutions, Marinda. . .)
 
Anyways, when I got back to the office, I immediately checked my server.
 Everything in DHCP and WINS indicated that my Win95 based computers on the
network should be able to recognise my HP 3000 and HP 9000 on the network by
their domain name, without a HOSTS file.
 
I tried again and again to ping the HP 3000 (alpha) and the HP 9000 (beta).
 PING would hang on my Win95 desktop, my Windows NT 4.0 server and my Win95
notebook.  After a blank screen and no action for 20-40 seconds, I would
abort the PING.  One day last week, I was messing around with cables in the
office and I PINGed Alpha from my desktop .  The phone rang and I answered
it.  I got into a conversation with the person and the other end, and I was
just staring at the screen which showed a hung PING program.  I was busy
writing things down during the call, so I left the PING alone.  To my
amazement, after about 3-4 minutes, PING reported echoing from Alpha and
everything was working as it should.  I tried to same thing to Beta, and
again after 3-4 minutes, the echo came back.  From the notebook, the same
situation. And from the server and from another Win95 desktop!
 
This made more sense, WINS was resolving the names from Win95 and NT albeit
after a long wait.  However, I could not use REFLECTION or any ODBC stuff,
because of the time outs.  I had to find out why the long delay was there.
 
I fired up WINIPCFG, a very handy program on Windows 95 and there I got my
first hint of the reason for the long delay.  Clicking on More Info, I found
that NetBIOS name resolution uses DNS box was checked.  Since I do not have
DNS running on any of my servers at the moment, I figured it was probably
trying to use the DNS server address which I use when I dial up my ISP in
order to try to resolve the names.  Since I was not connected to my ISP
during these test, this accounted for the long delay which was in fact a
time-out.
 
I disabled the DNS in my Win95 boxes, simply leaving the HOST and DOMAIN
names. In WINIPCFG, I only have a DNS server entry when I am connected to my
ISP, as I acquire that address automatically at logon (through DHCP) and the
NetBIOS using DNS box is still checked, however everything now works very
well.  On my NT server, I had to disable the Enable DNS for Windows
Resolution box on the WINS Address property sheet under Network Neighborhood.
 This is under Windows NT 4.0 beta 2 and released versions.
 
Shortly I will enable DNS on my Windows NT server and then my HP 3000 and HP
9000 will be able to resolve all the addresses on my network without a HOSTS
files.
 
Kind regards,
 
Denys. . .