Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!mfci!hsi!stevens
From: stevens@hsi.UUCP (Richard Stevens)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: NetBIOS over TCP/UDP
Summary: NetBIOS interface
Keywords: RFC 1001, RFC 1002
Message-ID: <187@hsi86.hsi.UUCP>
Date: 12 Oct 88 11:37:47 GMT
Article-I.D.: hsi86.187
References: <185@hsi86.hsi.UUCP> <957@asylum.UUCP>
Organization: Health Systems Intl., New Haven, CT
Lines: 45

In article <957@asylum.UUCP>, romkey@asylum.UUCP (John Romkey) writes:
> 
> Sorry, but that IS Netbios. The programming interface defines the
> semantics of the network operations and how you call them, and that's
> it. Netbios is the programming interface, not what's under it.

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.  That means to
take the source for, say, a file server, and port it to a UNIX VAX
that supports "NetBIOS over TCP" is non-trivial.  If there are
existing applications in C, for example, then does there exist a
standard C interface to NetBIOS that can be used in different
environments (i.e., both on a PC with "real" NetBIOS and on a systems
with NetBIOS over TCP) ?

The problem with (2) is who needs it ?  Wanting to preserve the
NetBIOS "user interface" seems like emulating the old OS/360 IO
Control Blocks using the Unix i/o interface.  Yes, it can be done,
but why ?  IBM has nicely given us a similar interface to TCP/UDP/IP
under VM, where everything happens through a single function.  That's
an interface that's not worth preserving, and it is non-trivial to
port any of our TCP applications from a BSD VAX using sockets to this
beast.

As I understand the interface for NetBIOS, you get a single function
that takes a single argument (ptr to an NCB struct) and everything
happens from there.  It would seem simple to add a better user
interface on top of that, but it would also be nice if that interface
were standard across different vendor's implementations.

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.

	Richard Stevens
	Health Systems International, New Haven, CT
	   stevens@hsi.uu.net
	   ... { uunet | yale } ! hsi ! stevens