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From: jbvb@FTP.COM ("James B. Van Bokkelen")
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.ibmpc
Subject: Re: A glossary of commonly used terms
Message-ID: <9012040011.AA05498@ftp.com>
Date: 4 Dec 90 00:11:55 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: jbvb@ftp.com
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 28


    I would like to meet anyone willing to offer an ear to my novice
    questions...

You probably should have gone to the InterOp show if you actually wanted to
'meet' them.  However, you've found a relatively informative forum here...

    Example: Most of my books on PC networking refer to a NetBIOS layer;
             does this have an equivalent layer on our HP900 (Unix)?  If not
             then how do I implement PC applications based on NetBIOS?

NetBIOS is too broad a term.  It has two main meanings, which conflict.
The first is "a session-layer Applications Programming Interface for DOS
PCs based on passing Network Control Blocks back and forth across INT 5Ch.
You can't do this on your HP, because it isn't an Intel processor...

The second is "API as above combined with low-level network driver and
transport layer to constitute a complete LAN-oriented protocol stack",
where the transport layer varies according to the vendor (IBM tends to
use LLC2, 3Com XNS, others use OSI or TCP/IP).  You can't do exactly this
on the HP either.   What you can do is build, on top of 4bsd sockets or
another TCP/IP API, code that handles the RFC 1001/1002 session layer
protocol and write applications that use this to act as SMB fileservers
or whatever you had in mind.  If the lower-layer protocol is non-standard
or proprietary, you may need to add that to your O/S as well...

James B. VanBokkelen		26 Princess St., Wakefield, MA  01880
FTP Software Inc.		voice: (617) 246-0900  fax: (617) 246-0901