Analyzing problems in the NetBIOS protocols
Network Basic Input/Output System (NetBIOS) is a set of protocols developed in the early 1980s for LAN communications. A few years later, it was adopted by Microsoft for their networking over the LAN, and then it was migrated for working over TCP/IP (NetBIOS over TCP/IP, RFCs 1001, and 1002).
In today's networks, NetBIOS provides three services:
- Name service (port 137) for name registration and name to IP address resolution.
- Datagram distribution service (port 138) for service announcements by clients and servers.
- Session service (port 139) for session negotiation between hosts. This is used for accessing files, open directories and so on.
In this chapter, we will get into some common problems with the NetBIOS suite of protocols, and we will learn how to try and solve them. Since the NetBIOS set of protocols is quite complicated, and there are hundreds of scenarios of things that might go wrong, we will try to provide some guidelines for how...
