Editing NetBIOS (section)

===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.