Many people confuse the ideas of a host name and a NetBIOS name when first attempting to understand the concepts. Simply put, a host name is an alias for an IP address –a name that is easier to remember than a 32-bit number. If a system doesn’t have an IP address, it doesn’t have a host name, and talking about host name resolution is then a non-issue. The reason for some of the confusion is that traditionally, the host name and NetBIOS name on a Windows-based system are the same by default, although this needn’t be the case, since they can be different. The process of having a host name and attempting to find the associated IP address is referred to as host name resolution, and can be accomplished using two main facilities – the HOSTS file, and DNS.
The HOSTS file is a text file found in the %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc directory on a Windows 2000-based system. This static file is used by the local system to resolve host names to an associated IP address. This is the first place from which a system will attempt to resolve a name, so it is important that it does not contain incorrect entries. Note also that the files is parsed from top to bottom, such that if multiple entries for a name exist, the first found will be used and the others ignored.
Any entries proceeded by a # symbol are considered comments. Note that HOSTS files were the original name resolution facility on the Internet prior to the creation of DNS. The size of the files eventually made this method impractical, but the simplicity of the file as a name resolution facility make them useful, even today.
DNS was invented largely due to the scalability issues associated with the creation and maintenance of a single flat text file for name resolution on the Internet. The Domain Name System is a distributed database of information maintained on DNS servers (actually more of a series of distributed localized text files called zone files). Having explored the process of DNS name resolution in previous articles, I will not repeat it here. Remember that the main purpose of DNS is to take a host name (or fully qualified domain name) and resolve it to an IP address. DNS forms the naming backbone of the Internet, via the 13 root name servers and thousands of other DNS servers that currently exist. (see the cache.dns file in the %systemroot%\system32\dns\samples directory for the root server list, or the Root Hints tab from the DNS server properties)
