Chapter 4. The Name Service in Detail

This is gonna hurt me more than it does you.

Common lie

Think of the Name Service as a database system. The data may be stored in an NBNS server (P mode), distributed across all of the participating nodes in an IP subnet (B mode), or a combination of the two (M or H mode).

Name Service messages are the transactions that maintain and utilize the NBT name-to-IP-address mapping database. These transactions fall into three basic categories:

Name Registration/Refresh

The process by which an application adds and maintains a NetBIOS name to IP address mapping within an NBT scope.

Name Query

The process of resolving a NetBIOS name to an IP address.

Name Release

The process by which a NetBIOS name to IP address mapping is removed from within an NBT scope.

These three represent the lifecycle of an NBT name.

The RFCs also specify support for the NetBIOS API Adapter Status Query function. Implementation of the Adapter Status Query is quite similar to that of the Name Query, so it gets lumped in with the Name Service. This is fairly reasonable, since the query packets are almost identical and the most important result of the status query is a list of names owned by the target node.