Guy Harris wrote:
Well, to be fair, NetBIOS was cooked up at a time when somebody could
conceivably have thought that TCP/IP was too much to put on a desktop PC
(although I think there may have been TCP/IP stacks small enough that
perhaps it wasn't), and so they put SMB atop NetBIOS, and so maybe they
were stuck with NetBIOS-over-TCP...
...but they *could*, I suspect, have put a damn reverse lookup op into
the NetBIOS Name Service protocol, to use if you're running with a WINS
server, and maybe even, if you're not using a WINS server, have it as a
broadcast request, just as forward lookups are broadcast requests if you
have no WINS server (it's already somewhat broadcast-heavy, I suspect
that wouldn't have made matters much worse).
Hmmm, I think reverse lookups just go out as if they were forward
lookups, and the server has to deal with it ...
At least that is what it looks like in all those classes I have given
when we look at it. Will have to look.
The list of contributors to the NetBIOS-over-TCP spec, at the end of RFC
1001 and 1002, has a bunch of Internet Old-Timers on it, though, so
maybe I'm missing something and there *is* a good reason not to have a
reverse lookup op. Or maybe it's just that the NetBIOS API didn't have
a reverse lookup op, nor did it have any operations that needed one, so
they didn't bother putting the request into the protocol.
--
Richard Sharpe, rsharpe@xxxxxxxxxx, LPIC-1
www.samba.org, www.ethereal.com, SAMS Teach Yourself Samba
in 24 Hours, Special Edition, Using Samba
