The names NetBIOS uses are quite different from the DNS hostnames you might be familiar with. First, NetBIOS names exist in a flat namespace. In other words, there are no qualifiers such as ora.com or samba.org to section off hostnames; there is only a single unique name to represent each computer. Second, NetBIOS names are allowed to be only 15 characters, may not begin with an asterisk (*), and can consist only of standard alphanumeric characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) and the following:
! @ # $ % ^ & ( ) - ' { } . ~
Although you are allowed to use a period (.) in a NetBIOS name, we recommend against it because those names are not guaranteed to work in future versions of NetBIOS over TCP/IP.
It's not a coincidence that all valid DNS names are also valid NetBIOS names. In fact, the DNS name for a Samba server is often reused as its NetBIOS name. For example, if you had a machine
phoenix.ora.com , its NetBIOS name would likely be PHOENIX (followed by 8 blanks).
