Diff between host and netbios names. 1

[panku]

Can u tell me wht is the diffrance between Host name and NetBios name.Can host name & netbios name can be differant in Win2k.If yes than how to change the host name in win2k.Actually i m having such pcs with diff host name and netbios names and i want to make it same.
Please help me resolve this problem.

reg,

Pankaj

 

[trusted]

A NetBIOS name is considered flat. Meaning it only has relevance in the local subnet/non routed domain. While Host name are considered hierarcha. Meaning that it has relevance on any domain using either Host files or DNS.

For example let's say that you have two domains the first one is called Zapco.com and the second one is called Wapco.com. If you only used NetBios names the computers Zapco.com would not be able to communicate with the computers on Wapco.com, because with NetBIOS names the only information used to find a resource would the the name of the resource.

While with Host names computer on both Zapco.com and Wapco.com would be able to communicate because not only is the resources name used, but the domain name as well.

Let's say that you have a computer named WKST42 on the Zapco.com domain. The NetBIOS name would be:

WKST42

And the Host name would be.

WKST42.Zapco.com

See how the Hosts name tells you not only the name of the resource but also what domain the it is located in, while the NetBIOS name does not.

For more information try looking at the hosts and lmhost.sam files located on C:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc . The Lmhost file is the file that uses NetBIOS names. Each file has good commented information about cinfiguration.