What happens if I disable NetBIOS?

What is the NetBIOS port used for?

I've long since been a huge proponent of open ports on all our appliances (including your router!), which is why you'll find NetBIOS in the firewall settings for some routers (not recommended though!) on this page - and even the most rudimentary off-the-shelf consumer router will have it! Why? The first thing to understand about the NetBIOS port is that it is used in two different ways. Let's look at an example of what both cases are: Using it for file sharing with file sharing. For a file share or network (think File & Printer Sharing), Windows Explorer uses the IP address (or name of the server) to find files on that server, regardless of the type of machine that's sending those requests. Why is this a bad idea? Well, there are two parts of this scenario: Your file share or network server(s) may not be fully trusted or configured correctly. Someone on the outside of the firewall can reach into and potentially alter the information sent by Windows, making it very easy for someone on the outside to change (or even alter) a document on your server. Using NetBIOS for something else entirely: Internet Faxing. Some businesses operate in large networks with hundreds of servers and printers. For each printer in use, you could need another computer just to print the faxes (that is, you don't just want to print everything from your server). To get everyone printing at the same time, your organization might use a fax server, as well.

When the fax server is set up, you need to tell Windows how to reach that machine for a specific print job. How do you do this? Using the Network Name or IP address! When the first machine sends out a request for something to be done, they also identify themselves, using their name, via NetBIOS name resolution (ie the server name). The second machine then replies, saying something like hey I'm machine2, and the fax server knows where to find this machine. By identifying themselves with the names of the server using the same protocol (NetBIOS), computers across your entire network now know where to find each other.

What does the NetBIOS do?

"NetBIOS" stands for "Network Basic Input/Output System," a type of Internet Protocol (IP) address that computers can use to exchange data with each other. When you create an Internet shortcut on the desktop, Windows Explorer saves its associated NetBIOS name. The NetBIOS name of a shortcut is typically an alphanumeric representation of the host name of the computer on which the shortcut resides. The host name, along with the NetBIOS name of the shortcut, is sent when the computer or the Windows Explorer program on your computer sends a message to another computer.

Why does it matter? You can use NetBIOS names to share files, printers, and other resources across a network. When you share a file from one computer to another on your network, you don't have to worry about naming the file with spaces, punctuation, or special characters. The name of the file you're sending will be converted to NetBIOS format by the computer to which you're sending the file. The recipient doesn't need to know the format of the NetBIOS name of the file.

For example, if you open your files folder in File Explorer on the computer running Windows Explorer, you'll find that the default shortcut for the files folder is < On this computer, the default shortcut for the files folder is c://myfolder/files. On other computers on the network, you might use a different folder name, such as d://myfolder/files, or even e://myfolder/files. In addition to allowing you to share folders, the NetBIOS name of a shortcut gives you a way to locate the location of a shared folder, if you ever need to.

NetBIOS names are also used to access shared printers. How do I view NetBIOS names on a computer? You'll see a list of NetBIOS names in a dialog box like the one shown in Figure 15-5. You might see multiple entries for a single computer. In the figure, the computer running Windows Explorer is shown with three entries in the list.

What happens if I disable NetBIOS?

The process is simple to do.

Just right-click on the taskbar icon for Active Directory Users and Computers and choose Properties. Then under NetBIOS, select "Disabled". (The procedure for doing this with all of your computers in your environment is a bit more involved, which I'll explain later.)

If you do this, then when you join or log into a computer that has this problem, you may find that you can't join because you're rejected by the Active Directory User & Computer console. However, the users on that computer can still login normally.

The reason for this behavior is a change in how WinXP handles the NT domain controller service. The first time that you boot your domain controller, you need to start the Domain Controller Services service manually. This is because of the way that Windows has updated the kernel for the domain controller service to use a new type of eventing model. When this is done, you will be able to start the service by just double-clicking on the service icon in the Services control panel.

When Windows is first started after this service is enabled, it checks the network to see if there is a Domain Controller available. If there isn't one, it won't bother starting the Domain Controller Services service. Instead, it will just start itself and create an object for the local system account. This is because the local system account is the only account that doesn't need to be joined to a domain and therefore shouldn't be running a domain controller.

As soon as the domain controller service starts, the eventing model starts. Windows checks if there are any domain controllers available on the network. If not, it won't bother trying to start the services on the servers. This is the same behavior that you'll find if you join a computer to a domain, and Windows immediately tries to start the Domain Controller service without asking if the server is running a domain controller.

After the eventing model starts up and is ready to accept requests, it starts looking for the Domain Controller for the local machine. This is the behavior that you'll find if you connect to a networked computer and Windows tries to connect to a domain controller on that computer. In fact, this is the behavior that you'll find even when there's no domain controller on the network.

What is a NetBIOS name example?

A NetBIOS name is a name that the computer recognizes when another computer wants to know what is running on your computer.

Each computer has a default netBIOS name, such as: computer-name-1, computer-name-2, and so on. But if a computer has a specific name, you can tell the other computer what is running on the computer.

When you run the following command on your computer, it tells you the name that the computer is running on the network: Get-NetBIOSName. I get a message that says Get-NetBIOSName : Cannot find the registry entry for NETBIOS name computer-name-2. You are correct. This command does not work on Windows Server 2026. However, it works on Windows XP and Windows Vista.

To get the name of a computer, you can run the following command on the computer: netdom querycomputer-name-1. The netdom command is used to get the name of a computer on the network. The netdom command must be run as an administrator on a computer.

If you run the netdom command, you can see the names of the computers on the network: What does it mean to have a domain name? A domain name is the Internet name for a computer or computer group on a local area network (LAN) or wide area network (WAN). The network name of the computer is the computer's hostname. The hostname has the following format:

Computer-name-1.example.com

If the computer is running Windows Server 2026, it has the following format: Computer-name-1.com If the computer is running Windows Server 2026 or Windows Server 2026 R2, it has the following format: The example.com is a part of the name. This means that there can be more than one example.com in the same computer name. For example, Computer-name-1.com could be Computer-name-1.com, Computer-name-2.com, and Computer-name-3.