Microsoft windows 2000 DNS Type Character Restrictions Maximum Length Name Service, NetBIOS name

a full DNS computer name, which is a concatenation of Host name and primary DNS suffix. The primary DNS suffix is part of the base machine configuration and is not related to any networking components. Non-networked or non-TCP/IP-based machines do not have primary DNS suffix. By default the primary DNS suffix of a computer is set to the DNS domain name of the Active Directory to which it is joined. To change the primary DNS suffix of a computer, a computer administrator should click System in Control Panel, click the Network Identification tab, click Properties, click More, and then enter a suffix in the Primary DNS suffix of this computer box. Primary DNS suffix could be also assigned to a group of computers through the group policy.

The table below contains comparison between a NetBIOS name and a DNS Hostname.

Type

Character Restrictions

Maximum Length

Name Service

NetBIOS name

Flat

A-Z, a-z, 0-9, whitespace, Unicode chars, symbols: ! @ # $ % ^ & ' ) ( . - _ { } ~ 16 bytes (including one reserved byte)

NBNS (WINS and broadcast)

Full computer name

Hierarchical

A-Z, a-z, 0-9, symbols: -_, Unicode chars. The dot, '.', has label separator meaning 63 UTF-8 bytes per label

255UTF-8 bytes for whole name

DNS

Thus, the NetBIOS name is restricted to 15 bytes, whereas a Host name can be up to 63 bytes long (DNS names are encoded in UTF-8 and are not necessarily one byte per character).

The Network Identification property page contains the following entries:

•Full Computer Name: MyComputer.MyCompany.com.

•Member of Domain: MyCompany.com.

In this example, the “MyComputer” is the Host name and NetBIOS name, while “MyCompany.com” is the primary DNS suffix.

Per-Adapter Naming

A machine with multiple adapters can acquire different domain names as part of the adapters’ IP configuration. The adapters of the machine can then be addressed on an individual basis by their Hostnames. An example of this configuration is shown below.

Windows 2000 White Paper 56