> Thanks for the info, but I still have some (rather pedestrian)
> questions about all this:
>
> Are NetBIOS and SMB the same thing?
Yes, functionally, people use NetBIOS and SMB to mean the same thing.
The difference is just pedantic: NetBIOS, as I mentioned, is an API,
whereas SMB ("Server Message Block") is a 'message format' transmitted
over the network. They essentially depend on each other in practice,
though there's no reason they'd *have* to.
> What's the difference (in practical terms, not technical details)
> between NetBEUI and IPX?
These days, when people say 'NetBEUI' and 'IPX', they're just talking
about two different protocols. (NetBEUI was originally just an extension
of NetBIOS, but nobody uses it that way anymore.)
If you're familiar with the OSI 'seven-layer' model, IPX is generally
classified as a level-3 (network) protocol, and I think NetBEUI is
considered a level-4 (transport) protocol, but I can't seem to find any
consensus on this by browsing the literature. (On the Novell side, SPX
would be the 'transport' protocol.)
> Why is it that with smbclient (which I haven't really used for a
> while), I always needed to specify exactly what host I wanted (usually
> as IP address, since network name rarely worked), whereas with windows
> (which I recently had to reinstall to do my astronomy homework,
> blech!) I can use "Network Neighborhood" to barf onto the network and
> generally find all the hosts in my workgroup or whatever?
Because Windows implements its own higher-level functionality on top of
the network protocols that automatically elects (when appropriate) and
then seeks out master browsers and backup browsers. These machines
'transparently' handle Network Neighborhood 'browsing'; they're also the
reason that the whole system is unreliable, especially on a campus where
students might just power down their machines at any time. (In an office,
it might be more reliable.)
Shawn