Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!husc6!think!ames!acornrc!asylum!romkey
From: romkey@asylum.UUCP (John Romkey)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: NetBIOS over TCP/UDP
Keywords: RFC 1001, RFC 1002
Message-ID: <958@asylum.UUCP>
Date: 13 Oct 88 16:06:39 GMT
References: <185@hsi86.hsi.UUCP> <957@asylum.UUCP> <187@hsi86.hsi.UUCP>
Reply-To: romkey@asylum.UUCP (John Romkey)
Organization: The Asylum; Belmont, CA
Lines: 65

In article <187@hsi86.hsi.UUCP> stevens@hsi.UUCP (Richard Stevens) writes:
>OK, my next question is "what is the purpose of NetBIOS over TCP" ?
>I see two answers:  (1) To take the existing horde of NetBIOS
>applications and run them on other systems;  (2) To provide another
>communication interface for a programmer.
>
>The problem with (1) is that I'd guess 99.9% of all existing NetBIOS
>applications are written *specifically* for the IBM PC and that a
>vast majority of them contain a lot of assembler code.

Very correct. Some vendors have talked about "porting NetBIOS" to UNIX
or other such systems. What they mean is bringing up the RFC 1001/1002
protocols under these systems, and some kind of who knows what
programming interface that probably can't have anything to do with the
standard NetBIOS interface unless you're running on an 80x86 system.

There's a worse problem, even in the PC domain. Many NetBIOS
applications, especially IBM-written ones, make use of undocumented
NetBIOS features, or timing or other bizarre details of the oldest
NetBIOS implementations, and it's pretty difficult to get these things
running correctly over NetBIOSes that are substantially different from
the IBM ones.

>The problem with (2) is who needs it ?  Wanting to preserve the

I don't know.

>It seems I'm missing something in the reasoning behind wanting
>NetBIOS over TCP, but given that vendors exist that sell this as a
>product there must be a need for it.  Can someone shed some light on
>just what people are doing with it ?  Thanks.

I think the whole purpose of NetBIOS over TCP is a political/marketing
one. A couple of years ago a lot of people thought that NetBIOS was
going to be THE way to go, THE way to talk to networks, because IBM
had blessed it. Right. So you saw NetBIOS over Netware, over 3+, over
ISO, over DECNet (I think), and then over TCP, by Excelan and
Ungermann-Bass. At the Air Force's behest (because of ULANA and all),
RFC 1001 and 1002 were written after much beating up of all parties
involved so that different vendors' NetBIOS over TCP's could actually
interoperate.

Why do the vendors care? As near as I can tell, it's so that they can
say they're IBM-compatible (never mind that a TCP NetBIOS wouldn't
talk to a NetBIOS over IBM protocols), and so because their customers
really told them they wanted NetBIOS.

When I was at FTP Software, I saw that a lot of the market place
didn't have the foggiest idea what NetBIOS was. "It lets you share
printers!" they cried. "We can use fileservers!" they said. "It does
record locking."

Right.

So now probably thousands of users have their NetBIOSes, like they
asked for. I think some of them run Microsoft Networks or the PC LAN
program in some version or another over it (seems a bit gratuitous on
Novell Netware or 3COM 3+), and there are a few database products that
let you query a central database through protocols that run over
NetBIOS. Other than that, I don't have the faintest idea what people
are using it for.
-- 
			- john romkey
UUCP: romkey@asylum.uucp		ARPA: romkey@xx.lcs.mit.edu
 ...!ames!acornrc!asylum!romkey		Telephone: (415) 594-9268