Editing NetBIOS (section)

==NetBIOS name vs Internet host name==
When NetBIOS is run in conjunction with [[Internet protocol suite|Internet protocol]]s (e.g., NBT), each computer may have multiple names: one or more NetBIOS name service names and one or more Internet host names.

===NetBIOS name===
The NetBIOS name is 16 ASCII characters, however Microsoft limits the host name to 15 characters and reserves the 16th character as a NetBIOS Suffix.<ref name="MS"/> This suffix describes the service or name record type such as host record, master browser record, or domain controller record or other services. The host name (or short host name) is specified when Windows networking is installed/configured, the suffixes registered are determined by the individual services supplied by the host. In order to connect to a computer running TCP/IP via its NetBIOS name, the name must be resolved to a [[network address]]. Today this is usually an [[IP address]] (the NetBIOS name to IP address resolution is often done by either broadcasts or a [[Windows Internet Name Service|WINS]] Server – NetBIOS Name Server). A computer's NetBIOS name is often the same as that computer's host name (see below), although truncated to 15 characters, but it may also be completely different.

NetBIOS names are a sequence of alphanumeric characters. The following characters are explicitly not permitted: <samp>\/:*?"<>|</samp>. Since Windows 2000, NetBIOS names also had to comply with restrictions on DNS names: they cannot consist entirely of digits, and the hyphen ("-") or full-stop (".") characters may not appear as the first or last character. Since Windows 2000, Microsoft has advised against including any full-stop (".") characters in NetBIOS names, such that applications can use the presence of a full-stop to distinguish domain names from NetBIOS names.<ref name="MS"/>

The Windows [[LMHOSTS]] file provides a NetBIOS name resolution method that can be used for small networks that do not use a WINS server.

===Internet host name===
A Windows machine's NetBIOS name is not to be confused with the computer's Internet host name (assuming that the computer is also an Internet host in addition to being a NetBIOS node, which need not necessarily be the case). Generally a computer running Internet protocols (whether it is a Windows machine or not) usually has a host name (also sometimes called a machine name). Originally these names were stored in and provided by a [[hosts (file)|hosts file]] but today most such names are part of the hierarchical [[Domain Name System]] (DNS).

Generally the host name of a Windows computer is based on the NetBIOS name plus the Primary DNS Suffix, which are both set in the System Properties dialog box. There may also be connection-specific suffixes which can be viewed or changed on the DNS tab in Control Panel → Network → TCP/IP → Advanced Properties. Host names are used by [[Application layer|applications]] such as [[telnet]], [[ftp]], [[web browser]]s, etc. To connect to a computer running the TCP/IP protocol using its name, the host name must be resolved into an [[IP address]], typically by a DNS server. (It is also possible to operate many TCP/IP-based applications, including the three listed above, using only IP addresses, but this is not the norm.)