SMB error: Hostname does not reply back with its machine name

[christopherpickering]

On intranet I am getting SMB error: Hostname does not reply back with its machine name when using

director = urllib.request.build_opener(SMBHandler)
fh = director.open(u"smb://username:password@host/share/file.txt")

Is there an alternate to NetBIOS() to getting hostname/IP?

Thanks,
Christopher