Chapter 6 -- Address Families and Name Resolution

Chapter 6

In order to establish communication through Winsock, you must understand how to address a workstation using a particular protocol. This chapter explains the protocols supported by Winsock and how each protocol resolves an address specific to that family to an actual machine on the network. Winsock 2 introduces several new protocol-independent functions that can be used with sockets of any address families; in most cases, however, each address family provides its own mechanisms for resolving addresses, either through a function or as an option passed to getsockopt. This chapter covers only the basic knowledge necessary to form an address structure for each protocol family. Chapter 10 covers the registration and name resolution functions, which advertise a service of a given protocol family. (This is a bit different from just resolving a name.) See Chapter 10 for more details on the differences between straight name resolution and service advertising and resolution.

For each covered address family, we will discuss the basics of how to address a machine on a network. We will then create a socket for each family. Additionally, we will cover the protocol-specific options for name resolution.