In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not. Unknown Ready? We have identified the three key parts of NBT: the Name Service, the Datagram Service, and the Session Service. This is enough to get us started. We will begin by coding up a simple Name Service Query, just to see what kind of trouble that gets us into. Before we start, though, it's probably a good idea to check our tools.  Sniffer You need one of these. If you have Windows systems available, see if you can get a copy of Microsoft's NetMon ( Net work Mon itor). You will want the latest and most complete version. The advantage of NetMon is that Microsoft have included parsers for many of their protocols. Another excellent choice is Ethereal, an Open Source protocol analyzer portable to most Unix-ish platforms and to Windows. It can create its own captures or read captures made by several other sniffer packages, including TCPDump and NetMon. Richard Sharpe and Tim Potter of the Samba Team have worked on NetBIOS and SMB packet parsers for Ethereal, which helps a big bunch. Language There are a lot of programming languages out there. Samba is written in C, and jCIFS is in Java. The key factors when choosing a language for your implementation are: Meditate on that for a while. Bad karma in the coding environment will distract you from your purpose. Test Environment If you do not have a couple of hubs, a router, various Windows boxes, and some Samba servers in your home, you may need to do your testing at the office. Netiquette and job security would suggest that you test after hours. (Um... actually, you probably shouldn't do any testing on a production network... and check office policy before you sniff.) Medication An aromatic black tea, such as a good Earl Grey, is best. Try Lapsang Souchong to get through really difficult coding sessions. Those sweet, mass-produced, over-caffeinated soft drinks will disturb your focus. Ready! In this section, we will implement a broadcast NAME QUERY REQUEST . That is, B mode name resolution. This will allow us to introduce some of the basic concepts and establish a frame of reference. In other words, we have to start somewhere and this seems to be as good a place as any. | 