How to grab a PC's name via WAN?

[MDesigner]

Let's say I have a computer, and someone else across the WAN has a PC.. is there a way they can, using my IP, grab the name of my computer? Any software to do this? If not, what are the technical details involved here?

EDIT: I believe the terminology here is NetBIOS name..

 

[Nothinman]

If the Windows RPC ports are open all they have to do is run nmblookup (nbtstat on Windows) and it'll ask your machine for it's name, sometimes Windows is also nice enough to give out the name of the logged in user as well.

 

[ktwebb]

Across a WAN could mean a few things. I'll assume since you didn't specify that your talking about the internet as the WAN. Perhaps another location within your company? Makes a difference. Internet providers should not be passing nbtstat requests across their routers. I wouldn't think so anyway. Now if your talking about across a company's router infrastructure on the WAN, you'd have to ask your admins.

If your really meant LAN when you said WAN, then nbtstat would be a typical tool you'd use to get the NetBIOS name. nbtsat /? from a command prompt to get the switches but if you knew the IP it would be C:\nbtstat -A x.x.x.x where x.x.x.x is the IP.