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Name Resolution

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While IP is designed to work with the 32-bit IP addresses of the source and the destination hosts, computers users are much better at using and remembering names than IP addresses.

If a name is used as an alias for the IP address, a mechanism must exist for assigning that name to the appropriate IP node to ensure its uniqueness and resolving it to its IP address.

In this section, the mechanisms used for assigning and resolving host names (which are used by Windows Sockets applications), and NetBIOS names (which are used by NetBIOS applications) are discussed.