NetBEUI...

[Drone]

First I would like to say hello to all and appreciate all comments.

Quick Breakdown,
My company has what I would consider a just over standard LAN in each location. We have Cisco IP phones attached to powered routers, and most of our machines connect to the LAN via the 10/100 port on the Cisco phones. Edge servers for local storage or apps, Citrix terminal servers for apps and a large EMC NAS device for storage as well in a data center. We use AD, and have a few domain controllers, and login into cached domain profiles when off of the domain. Sorry if any of my verbiage or explination is wrong...

When our users are out in the field they take Linksys WRT54G wireless routers with them to share files from a specific folder created at the root drive of each machine, these machines are all (XP pro SP2 BTW). This file is shared with obviously Microsoft file and print sharing. None of these field connections consist of no more than 5-6 people.

Where NetBEUI comes into the factor of this post is, I had some users out in the field that were unable to share files. Other techs determined that the reason this feature was not working is because NetBEUI was not installed on the machine. What gets me is from what I can tell NetBEUI cannot be bound to MS File and print share anymore on XP as you were able to do with 98 and Mil. So I am not buying that NetBEUI was really a fix for this. My concern is also that if we have NetBEUI on our network it is causing more noise on our LANs than need be, especially with our IP phones, I know they are on a different subnet but is there still concern for excessive chatter with NetBEUI?

NetBEUI is an unsupport protocol in XP even though you can indeed install it, but in no way shape or form can I fathom that the lack of NetBEUI would have disallowed the sharing of files.

Any thoughs?

Thank You in advance.

rg

[Drone]

Originally Posted by Drone

What gets me is from what I can tell NetBEUI cannot be bound to MS File and print share anymore on XP as you were able to do with 98 and Mil. So I am not buying that NetBEUI was really a fix for this.

Ok just found that this is not true and an assumption I made based on me digging through my machine... I found where you can bind connections.

But my other concerns and qustions still apply... thanks

http://www.practicallynetworked.com/..._protocols.htm

[johnwill]

So what are the exact questions?

[Drone]

If NetBEUI has negative effects with VOIP?

If NetBEUI is bound to File and Print Sharing on one machine and TCP/IP is bound to File and Print Sharing on anothr machine will this disable the sharing of files between two machines if they are on the same IP range and subnet, with a common user and password on each machine?

Thanks

[johnwill]

NETBEUI will be invisible to VoIP.

If you remove the binding of file/print sharing from TCP/IP, then only the machines with NETBEUI will share files. NETBEUI doesn't know anything about IP addresses or subnets.

[Cellus]

So long as NetBEUI is installed on the appropriate machines it will function as intended - you do not configure NetBEUI at all. Just make sure those which are sharing using NetBEUI are on the same network segment. As Johnwill said, NetBEUI doesn't know/use IP addresses or subnets - it uses broadcasts and names. NetBEUI is fairly chatty as it broadcasts a lot, especially if there are a lot of NetBEUI nodes on a network segment, however it wouldn't be causing noise (in the audible sense) on your VoIP phones.

By the way, why are those out of the office sharing local folders instead of, say, going to a central location such as a file server?

[Drone]

If our citrix access gateways are not available due to a lack of internet connections we share the files from one machine. The manager that is running the engagement keeps all of the template files on his or her machine and they share the files to the other team memebers, for security reasons we do not allow our people to use flash or thumb drives.

[Drone]

Thank you for the responses.

[Drone]

Originally Posted by johnwill

NETBEUI will be invisible to VoIP.

If you remove the binding of file/print sharing from TCP/IP, then only the machines with NETBEUI will share files. NETBEUI doesn't know anything about IP addresses or subnets.

So if I have a machine that has TCP/IP and NetBEUI on it and MS File and print sharing is bound to NetBEUI will it share to a machine that has both protocols as well but MS file and print sharing is bound to TCP/IP on the second machine?

[johnwill]

As long as file/print sharing is bound to NETBEUI on the two machines, they'll connect. If you have it bound only to TCP/IP on one and NETBEUI on the other one, they would not see each other.

[Drone]

Thank you very much sir. I appreciate the responses.

Just for conversation sake, I am testing Vista Enterprise in my office and was able to install NetBEUI with the XP drivers. Not sure if it worked or not I got no furthur than testing the install. It did tell me that the driver was not digitally assigned.

I honestly feel that NetBEUI has no place in our environment, the one thing that I keep running into is the layer of security NetBEUI can provide if the machines are obtaining a public address from an internect connection (DSL or cable)... but we send them with wireless routers that are set up to hand out private IP's so this essentially a non-issue.

I did however find this on wiki...
Availability
NetBEUI - apart from DOS and Unix implementations - is officially supported by Microsoft on almost every version of Windows until Windows 2000[2], but its use has decreased quickly since the development of NetBIOS-over-TCP/IP.

Microsoft officially dropped its support starting from Windows XP[3], although it still provided the user with an unsupported way to manually install it from the original CD-ROM[4] to both encourage and ease the necessary transition to the NetBIOS-over-TCP/IP.

Because of this, officially nothing is known about whether or not NetBEUI can be unsupportedly but effectively installed on Windows Vista, and even unofficial reports seem to be unavailable on the Internet. Besides this, an additional reason of concern may be that, since the TCP/IP network stack changed significantly in Windows Vista[5], the client ([Client for Microsoft Networks]) and server ([File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks]) components - which the network protocols are bound to - could have changed too due to the rewriting process, and could have lost their previous ability to bind to the NetBEUI protocol written for Windows XP. Despite this, it seems that installing NetBEUI on Windows Vista using NetBEUI's files taken from Windows XP original CD-ROM works effectively, with no apparent problems, and supporting all the authentication schemes (LM, NTLM, NTLMv2).

But this on MS...
http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Win...45f1e1033.mspx

Will work but unsupported again is my guess...

[johnwill]

Actually, NETBEUI was a standard protocol on 2K, it only became "optional" for XP, but it was still on the disk. I've never tried installing it on Vista, that's an interesting experiment.