2.1.1 NetBIOS Name Notation

The CIFS Browser Protocol encapsulates its messages in the Remote Mailslot Protocol, as specified in [MS-MAIL]. The Remote Mailslot Protocol requires a NetBIOS name for identification when specifying the origin of a mailslot message or the destination for a mailslot message. Additionally, CIFS Browser Protocol fields that require a NetBIOS name MUST be formatted as specified in [RFC1001] section 14. This section describes additional requirements when using NetBIOS names.

Before a NetBIOS name can be used, it MUST be registered with a name service as specified in [RFC1001] section 5.2.

As discussed in [MS-NBTE] section 1.8, the CIFS Browser Protocol uses NetBIOS suffix. Thus a NetBIOS name is effectively divided into two components: a Name, which MUST be a maximum of 15 bytes (and MUST be padded with spaces [0x20] if shorter than 15 bytes) and a NetBIOS suffix in the 16th byte. For example, the notation EXAMPLE[0x19] indicates a NetBIOS name that consists of the following hexadecimal bytes.

 0x45, 0x58, 0x41, 0x4D, 0x50, 0x4C, 0x45, 0x20, 
 0x20, 0x20, 0x20, 0x20, 0x20, 0x20, 0x20, 0x19

This specification also defines a unique NetBIOS name for the CIFS Browser Protocol, referred to as [01][02]__MSBROWSE__[02][01]. It consists of the following hexadecimal bytes.

  
 0x01, 0x02, 0x5F, 0x5F, 0x4D, 0x53, 0x42, 0x52, 
 0x4F, 0x57, 0x53, 0x45, 0x5F, 0x5F, 0x02, 0x01

Note There are two underscore (0x5F) characters before and after the word MSBROWSE. The name defines all 16 bytes of the NetBIOS name, thus effectively using a NetBIOS suffix of 0x01.

Names that are placeholders and that need to be substituted with actual values are placed inside angle brackets (< >). Therefore, the string <domain> becomes REDMOND if the domain under consideration is named REDMOND. Details of the various NetBIOS names that are used for browsing are specified in the following sections.