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Monday, July 09, 2007

Finding a Windows computer based on its NetBios name

A short tip: when working in hybrid environments (that is where both Windows and Linux machines are present), it is useful to be able to lookup a machine IP based on its NetBios name. You can do this by writing nmblookup [the name of the computer]. This will do a broadcast on all the interfaces querying the directly attached subnets for machines which match the given name and will output their IP addresses.

2 comments:

  1. This only works if the Windows machines are running NetBIOS. Which they really ought not to be... although it is fairly common in large installations still.

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  2. By default it runs NetBIOS, so it should work quite well. By the way NetBIOS over IP is a broadcast level protocol as far as I know, so this will work only on the local subnet.

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