Chapter 1 -- NetBIOS

Chapter 1

Network Basic Input/Output System (NetBIOS) is a standard application programming interface (API) developed for IBM in 1983 by Sytek Corporation. NetBIOS defines a programming interface for network communication but doesn't detail how the physical frames are transmitted over a network. In 1985, IBM created the NetBIOS Extended User Interface (NetBEUI), which was integrated with the NetBIOS interface to form an exact protocol. The NetBIOS interface became popular enough that vendors started implementing the NetBIOS programming interface on other protocols such as TCP/IP and IPX/SPX. Platforms and applications throughout the world rely on NetBIOS to this day, including many components of Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 95, and Windows 98.

NOTE
Windows CE does not support the NetBIOS API, even though it supports TCP/IP as a transport protocol and NetBIOS names and name resolution.

The Win32 NetBIOS interface offers backward compatibility with older applications. This chapter discusses the fundamentals of NetBIOS programming. First we will cover the NetBIOS basics, beginning with a discussion of NetBIOS names and LANA numbers. We'll follow this with a discussion of basic services offered by NetBIOS, such as session-oriented and connectionless (datagram) communications. In each section, we will present a simple client and server example. We'll wrap up this chapter with some common pitfalls and bugs that programmers often run into. Appendix A provides a command reference that summarizes each NetBIOS command with its required parameters and a short description of its behavior.

The OSI Network Model

The Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) model offers a high-level representation of network systems. The OSI model contains seven layers that fully describe fundamental network concepts from the application down to the physical method of data transmissions. Figure 1-1 illustrates the seven layers of the OSI model.

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Figure 1-1. The OSI network model

Relative to the OSI model, NetBIOS fits primarily into the Session and Transport Layers.



Network Programming for Microsoft Windows
Linux Server Hacks, Volume Two: Tips & Tools for Connecting, Monitoring, and Troubleshooting
ISBN: 735615799
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 1998
Pages: 159

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