DNS/netbios

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

actually, NBT (NetBIOS over TCP/IP) (rfc1001 / 1002) was designed to be
hierarchical.  NBNS is based on DNS (extended to include name registration
and name release).  the DNS sub-zone field was overloaded to be NetBIOS
"scope", and was intended to be exactly the same as the DNS sub-zone, from
the first leading period, onwards (just like DNS?).

what went wrong?

nobody bothered to implement NetBIOS scope properly or fully.  it's for
LAN use, right???

so, if vendors started actually _using_ scope properly (e.g reporting it
in the Network Neighbourhood: NetBIOSNAME[.scope]) then it would soon get
used properly, as intended.


On Thu, 13 Jan 2000, David Bear wrote:

> This will really bite you in the tail if you have your smb resolver in nt
> set to look in a dns for netbios names...  The BIG thing about netbios and
> dns is DNS is heirarchical and partitionable. whereas the netbios name
> space is flat and non-partionalable.  It would be very difficult if not
> impossible to have a netbios name server handle every netbios name in the
> known world.  This is why dns was invented, so you could partition the
> name space and delagate management of those names to downline servers.
> Moreover, smb clients and servers register more than a single name -- and
> there are shared/non-unique names -- and it is all very dynamic.  My
> question is, when nt uses dns to resolve a netbios name, what does it do
> to the 16 byte when looking for machine name, workgroup name, pdc name,
> etc?  
> 
> David Bear
> College of Public Programs/ASU
> A word is just two nibbles and a byte...
> 

<a href="mailto:lkcl at samba.org"   > Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton    </a>
<a href="http://www.cb1.com/~lkcl"> Samba and Network Development   </a>
<a href="http://samba.org"        > Samba Web site                  </a>
<a href="http://www.iss.net"      > Internet Security Systems, Inc. </a>
<a href="http://mcp.com"          > Macmillan Technical Publishing  </a>

 ISBN1578701503 DCE/RPC over SMB: Samba and Windows NT Domain Internals