On Sun, 28 Feb 1999, Chad Glendenin wrote:
> Does Network Neighborhood browsing have something to do with NetBIOS over
> NetBEUI? How does IPX fit in? I've never been clear on all that LAN stuff.
Network Neighborhood is basically a melting pot, so to speak. It shows
hosts of all different types, broadcasting on all different transports.
Windows NT separates out the various 'branches' of the network: i.e.,
it'll show a "Microsoft Windows Network" branch and a "NetWare" branch.
Windows 95 simply mixes them. (It may use different icons; I forget
offhand.)
Netware servers communicate over IPX and will be shown if your Windows
machine has IPX and a suitable network client (e.g., the Microsoft Client
for NetWare networks) installed.
Windows servers communicate over NetBIOS, but saying this doesn't mean all
that much, since technically NetBIOS is just an API that implements
various high-level networking functions. (This is "high-level" compared
to the transport layer... it's *not* particularly attractive to program
in, and there are much better abstractions that *use* the NetBIOS API.)
NetBIOS can use several different transports -- most notably NetBEUI and
TCP/IP. The latter is obviously becoming more important; NetBIOS-over-
TCP/IP (often abbreviated NBT) is the best way for Windows machines to
communicate these days. It's the only thing that's really 'supported' on
campus this year; IPX and NetBEUI won't work indefinitely.
(While LAN-based protocols like NetBEUI and IPX are technically slightly
more efficient on a LAN than wide-area protocols like TCP/IP, the network
as a whole operates better when only one transport protocol needs to be
routed.)
To tie this back into Linux, NBT is the reason that using smbclient (and
Samba itself) doesn't require any new protocols on your end, the way that
installing netatalk requires AppleTalk protocol support. You're simply
communicating with Windows machines using TCP/IP, throwing Windows's
'native' protocol on top of it.
Shawn