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Procom to Release NETBEUI for Linux
Procom has announced that they are releasing their NETBEUI stack to the Linux community. Press release is here. What the press release doesn't mention is that the stack will be available under the GPL license. The actual code release will be today or tomorrow (I will post a URL for the source as soon as I get it).
It's Red Hat, Slackware, and a few other culprits who like to turn all services on by default.
I went to a "security site" with this stock W2K install that I am running and had it portscan. No unneeded ports were left open. In fact, they were configured to just not answer. That's called giving portscanners a "black hole" and it forces them to observe timeouts which slows down the little thugs running them.
Again, the security risk running just about any version of Linux is greater than W2K.
Ever hear of an Intel Netport Express print server? Guess what...you MUST RPL it using netbeui. Until now, I had to store it's config files on a windoze box that isn't always up. If I could run netbeui on a linux server, I can RPL the print server without having to use windoze.
Newer versions have web management built in, but why spend that kind of money for a home lan when you can get a used netport for $20?
Much of the excitement we get out of our work is that we don't really know what we are doing. -- E. Dijkstra
I'd like to know what all this comprises, apart from the docs on how to make it play nicely with Samba. If you actually buy their towers, you get a couple of CDs - one has the kernel source on it, as required by the GPL. In there, you can get the NetBEUI stuff already. So, this stuff has already been "out" for awhile in one sense of the word.
Maybe this means they're getting a clue. The CD FORCE units I have in a middle school are running some ancient 2.0 kernel and thus are vulnerable to the likes of teardrop. Fortunately they seem to have a hardware watchdog, since it eventually springs back to life.
Put it this way - when I called up asking for a kernel upgrade to deal with this "little" problem, they shipped me an upgrade for their "MESA" (Linux renamed, mind you) that didn't fix the kernel issue at all. Duh.
Join our Anti-Linux oganization here.
Unix is so old and icky, I'd avoid it like the plague.
smbclient uses TCP/IP...
You can give a network interface more than one IP address. On top of your DHCP IPs, give your cards a private IP like 192.168.0.x. Use the private IPs to talk between your computers.
That is pretty cool of Procom to join the GPL scene, but seriously ... who give two shits about NetBEUI anymore. Most NetBIOS networks I see nowadays, run their NetBIOS over TCP/IP, which works about as well as expected.
But NetBEUI? Why would anyone use that in today's day and age. Unless you're designing a high speed system or a standalone custom (like in a auto or something), I see this release news as mostly noisy output from another "me too" open source come lately.
While were at it, can somebody get the source to Lantastic released. I think that would be cool (not).
--Aaron Newsome
The crew Dave Cutler brought from Oregon were going to be building 32-bit OS/2 v.3. The problems in the relationship with IBM were exacerbated by MS insisting that the next OS/2 MUST be 32-bit, while IBM was convinced that a lighter, 16-bit version would still storm the market, given a little more time.
Gates & Ballmer got the agreement to split 16 and 32 -bit development with IBM on company lines. It was only as Win3.x applications began to emerge as the business standard that MS got the courage to implement a Win API subsystem on the NT kernel, as opposed to a PM subsystem.
The console-based OS/2 subsystem present through NT 4 was a vestige of this original direction.
Enough of this! See what talking about NetBEUI will dredge forth from the depths!
These were not systems that were designed or engineered... Rather, they were politic'ed and marketed into existance!
--Jeremiah
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The MS branded box (plain white, with a RED stripe) came when you orderd your Toshiba laptop with OS/2, etc.
We had one of these. A 386SX, with an orange/mono VGA -- AC power only!
--Jeremiah
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This is not passed onto any "network co-processor" at the NIC, etc.
InterProphet is one of many companies embedding the TCP stack in Silicon, to achieve higher performance this way. Still, AFAIK, a "stub" TCP stack would need to be patched into the kernel sources for this to work in Linux. If the masq features and all the other goodies are not supported on the "silicon stack", you're out of luck. You really aren't on the Linux (BSD, etc.) TCP code anymore.
--Jeremiah
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Now THATS an interesting idea!
Care for explaining with more details how to do this?
Hetz (Heunique)
Yes it's true. OS/2 up to version 1.2 was a joint product of IBM and Microsoft. And the split came when Microsoft tried to let IBM develop OS/2 version 2 while Microsoft monopolised OS/2 version 3 (a preannounced vapourware product).
It was a bit like that moment in Land of the Pharaohs when Princess Nellifer (Joan Collins) lets the Pharaoh bleed to death in front of her, to further her own ambitions.
george
I think /. ate my first post. Argh.
...
Anyway, isn't netbeui supposed to be a lot "lighter" weight protocol that tcp over ip? Lighter as in less bytes. which means more throughput.
Could I maybe run MPI or PVM over this on a cluster and gain some speed? TCP is known to be a dog for dsitribted computing, maybe this is a better off the shelf solution.
I would appreciate anyone who has tried this speaking up and letting me know before I blow time on it
later,
dv
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
before someone tells me all about kernel MPI ... already know all about it ... this could be more flexible and run on fddi.
i suppose I should dig up some doc on netbeui, huh?
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
That is exactly how I was able to get Linux "in the door" at many locations.
The ability for linux to understand many of the legacy protocols is definitly a great plus. It is great for a small buisness that has a few machines and is in need of a cheap (as in $$$) solution to replace or to communicate with some piece of hardware that they can no longer find. NetBEUI, although being an old outdated protocol, is still in use..
For many small buisnesses, once they see that it can solve one problem.. the next question I usually get is in the line of "so... what else can this Linux thing do..."
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Amarillo Linux Users Group
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Time is on my side
Yes..
Lookup MARS NWE... (nwserv)
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Amarillo Linux Users Group
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Time is on my side
Now I have to go back and tell all the people I've been telling no, Samba is NetBIOS over TCP/IP, not NetBEUI that now Samba is (or will be, shortly) also NetBEUI. *sigh*
This is good news in fact. Any user can set NetBEUI up, since there's nothing to setup. It doesn't help my old fight against former co-netadmins to stop them from polluting the network with NetBEUI, who will probably install it by default now, but so is life, you have to lick it one day at a time...
You're confusing David Bowie (bow as in bow and arrow) with Jim Bowie (boo-ee).
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
"Marconi Corp. GPL's the "Morse Code" stack"
It may not be theirs to GPL. Samuel F.B. Morse was using it about a half a century before Marconi, Tesla, Edison, Sarnoff, any of those guys. No doubt his heirs are still vigorously defending all patents, trademarks, copyrights, service marks, etc. You might even want to think twice before using S.O.S. brand soap pads.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Yes, DMZ is "Demilitarized Zone", and it refers to the area of the network that is after the external router, but still in front of the firewall. It is used for externally accessable services, like a web server, dns server or mail relay.
Okay, well... now that I'm bald that doesn't help much.
I spoke to an MSCE friend of mine, and he says it's a MS protocol. Also, according to these guys, it really is a Microsoft protocol.
Net-Bew-Ee
Is that free poo as in free beer (Heineken, Budweiser,...) or free speech (KKK, hippies, ...)?
NetBEUI was nice when you had a small office with a few machines and needed a quick and easy lan to setup. It still is the easiest way to setup a few windows machines to share files or printers.
But for me, its TCP/IP and a DHCP server.
One last thought, since its easy to setup, maybe it would be good for Home Stereo Equipment. No IP, just NetBEUI the linux(mp3?) box.
Brook Harty
-IronWolve- Tribes, UT, Half-life.. No time to code!
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" It's a ligne Maginot-in-the-sky "
I know nothing about NetBUI but I'm SURE somewhere they are using it as a primary protocol for a network and it is just nice to be able have the option of running Linux on it. So all the Linux people should be happy that more people can run Linux now. :-)
- 8Complex
heck yeah, hasn't anyone seen Independence Day? sheesh :)
I post links to stuff here
You are right. Completely on target.
I had my head up my ass there in my clamor to denounce NetBEUI.
Replace "Bandwidth" with "Efficiency."
:)
-Kevin
My posts don't reflect the opinion of my employer, and my employer's opinion doesn't influence the content of my posts.
Anyone care to share with me exactly what DMZ is? The only thing I can think of is "De-militarized Zone", and that's obviously not it.
"I'd like to live in theory, because everything works in theory, in theory." - Can't remember who said this.
Microsoft's Remote Access Server has done this for years (for NetBEUI over serial links). It's most likely possible to do with network links too.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Check the MS-DOS Client 3.0 on your NT Server disk -- This does include a DOS TCP/IP implementation, and one that understands MS WINS, DHCP, and Domain security to boot.
It does use lots of memory. It can't be installed directly onto a floppy disk (install to hard disk, selectively copy files to floppy, it will fit.) You need to manually install the DOS NDIS NIC drivers by editing INI files. It should work from a NIC Boot ROM. With some trickery, it should run under Windows 9x.
It's a pain in the ass, but when you get it working, it works pretty good (although much slower than NetBEUI).
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
NetBEUI was designed by IBM in around 1983 for old-style single segment LANs. A single segment LAN is what I have in my house. I run NetBEUI between the Windows boxes, and it is F-A-S-T.
Maybe MS's TCP/IP filesharing is just broken. Doesn't matter. If you can get away with using NetBEUI for Doze/Samba stuff, I recommend using it.
(Auto configuration and non-routability is also a plus -- If you have cable/DSL, you can unbind SMB/"WINS Client" from TCP/IP on your NT boxes and use NB for local file+print, and worry less about the evil haxors.)
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Virtually every PC shipped comes with USB -- you can't get better economies of scale. Ethernet is $20 mature tech, sure, but it's apparently not cheap enough for most vendors to give it away.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
More history -- Microsoft sold the server version of OS/2 1.3 directly as "Microsoft LAN Manager 2.x". Earlier versions were not sold directly by MS, but were known as 3Com 3+Open and AT&T Somthinerother. These products together accumulated about a 10% market share (largely due to the difficulty of NetBEUI.)
The word "LanMan" is still all over the NT documentation. The "Server" service used to be called "LanMan Server" in NT 3.x, for example. MS claimed that it was based directly on the OS/2 networking code, and therefore bug-for-bug compatible. Microsoft wanted to hang onto that 10% market share when they moved to NT, so the networking was taken wholesale from LAN Manager.(Things started to change a bit around NT4 SP4 -- it was no longer possible to have mixed OS/2 and NT domain controllers, for example.)
IBM's version was/is known as "LAN Server" -- OS/2 Warp Server 5.0 is actually based on the Warp Client 4.0 codebase, the reason for the version number difference is MS's escalation to 2.0 back in the 1980s. The more things change, the more things seem to stay the same.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I have a Alcatel ADSL bridge, and was concerned about this. According to someone at my ISP, non-IP stuff gets killed right at the CO. With DSL at least, you are clogging your own bandwidth, but you shouldn't be clogging anyone elses or leaking insecure NetBEUI packets.
(I'm aware Cable works differently, but I probably won't care how until they start installing it here in 2003.)
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Can Linux print to a NetWare print queue? (Or, how about an oldskool HP DLC printer?)
AppleTalk+PostScript might be a better bet.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
You might have reached aesthetic perfection by squashing NetBEUI, but your network is much slower for it.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Of course, if I can get Administrator or root access to one box that is running both TCP/IP and NetBEUI, it's possible I could gateway between them. But by then it's basically too late anyway.
The number one way that Win home boxes are hacked is leaving file sharing enabled on TCP/IP. (Vendors seem to ship this way.) NetBEUI is a great, but not perfect, solution to this problem.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Do a little testing with a couple isolated NT boxes. NetBEUI is perceptually quite a bit faster for small file copies and browsing. On our real LAN, we have a old Pentium 60 NT server with an ISA NIC. Large TCP/IP file copies bog down and barely complete. NetBEUI transfers zip.
(Could it be something wrong with NT's SMB/TCPIP instead of something right with SMB/NetBEUI? Got me!)
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Yes, but a big chunk of that $39.99 is probably an 'upgrader tax' for a nitch market product, and has nothing to do with the real cost of the chipset.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Mmmh - I do not want to wander too much off-topic, but I would find a NETBIOS over TCP BROWSER a very convenient thing to have in order to move files around a LAN. Essentially, being able to access the Nethood from LInux. I just wonder why Linux does not have any interesting toy like that - do all people love ftp ? It would make sense to have such functionality in integreated environments like KDE (their file browser even supports TAR URLs!) - so, am I missing something in the picture ? Is it so tough to write a netbios browser ? Or is it out there and I am blind and cannot find it ?
--- "I didn't think anyone would understand it" -Prof. Bob Muller
Well, you could use NFS rather than FTP, you know. If every machine exports the necessary directories, you basically have a network neighborhood. Especially if you have some sort of automounting magic going on - I can cd into any other developer's /home (assuming I have permissions) for example. So they are my "network neighborhood" in a sense. And you could then access the various NFS mounts through whatever filesystem browser you want: mc, kfm, etc.
Or are you thinking of something totally different?
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
That reminds me, at a place I used to work they had the Kronos timecard system. It uses a barcode reader for the timecards and some DOS software to read the logs, the logs interface into the payroll system. IIRC that could only talk NetBEUI to the NT server they were using, which made the server config just one notch more complicated and made the routing just one notch harder.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
The Corel filemanager, based on KDE, has this functionality. The KDE2 filemanager will have this as well. There are several other programs like LinNeighborhood that do this too. Love the freshmeat.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
What's the difference between using file/print sharing over IPX/SPX instead of NetBEUI?
(Too bad samba doesn't support IPX)
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Lab test show that use of micro$oft causes deadly cancer in lab animals.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK you still can't run Linux on a 286. There was that one project... did that get anywhere?
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
On NT 4, you can damn near get the theoretical bandwidth limit of your cable with such a small protocol like NetBEUI. The major problem of NOT being routable is not a problem in a LAN. In a cool scenario, you could use NetBEUI only on your LAN Servers, and load NETBEUI and TCP/IP on the workstations for Internet connectivity. This protects your servers from direct Internet intrusions to the servers. It does add bloat to the workstations, but hey, we gotta get used to that bloat!!
I have a dedicated print server box that supports IPX, NETBEUI and AppleTalk. It is simple to use from a Windows or MacOS desktop. I haven't figured out an easy way to connect to it from Linux. NETBEUI support in Linux would make this easy.
And why is it better than having an ip filter on the resource server allowing only the webserver contact the resource server? Resource server will only be available to the web server in both cases. But you won't have the headache of running two different network protocols on the webserver.
Please tell me this will allow me to authenticate against MS Proxy Server from Mozilla (or even Netscape). Or is that protocol a level (or two) above SMB itself?
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Actually, if you put LanManager on a floppy you can do this with straight TCP/IP. The IP stack itself is very small, but the NIC drivers are HUGE. I was only ever able to fit 4 drivers on a disk (typically NE2000, NE2000+, Intel EtherExpress, Intel EtherExpress PRO, IIRC).
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Here is the result of your Slashdot Purity Test.
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I have never... let me say that better... I have NEVER had anything resembling a good experience with NetBEUI. That could be because I've always worked on boxes that were connected to TCP/IP networks and had their own boot devices. Let's just agree that Windows with both TCP/IP and NetBEUI protocols loaded drags like nothing ever dragged before.
That said, it's good to be reminded now and then that there are networks out there with hardwired terminals and such that can benefit from this protocol.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
Silly question. Just *how* would you gateway between TCP/IP and NetBEUI?
Actually, and please don't respond with a flame, it's totally not worth it, but NetBEUI is actually a really fast protocol if you're just working within a really small LAN. Sure, it's a messy broadcast protocol, but it requires very little to no administration and on 100Mbps lines would cause negligible broadcast traffic.- ------------------
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You can do this though. Using samba file sharing this can be done. I've seen this done using FreeBSD.
this space for rent
There's already a utility called gnomba (SMB workgroup browser for Gnome - check freshmeat) and a similar one for KDE, I do believe.
Just use a winsock implementation that interfaces to a DOS packet driver.
I'm not sure how to do it with native win95/98/ME networking (there are options to use a Real Mode driver, but I haven't explored them).
However, you could use a product such as Trumpet Winsock 16-bit with the Packet Driver option... I remember doing that for a little while after upgrading from Win 3.1.
I had "ne2000.com 0x60 0x300 9" (or something like that) in my autoexec.bat and setup Trumpet to use the packet driver at int 0x60. Worked fine, but DNS lookups were slow for some reason.
Hands in my pocket
* Isn't it the MOST used protocol on every Windows machine? Or am I mistaken? Last I checked, most peer-to-peer windows networks had NetBEUI as the default protocol on all their machines. Doesn't Procom get a royality per copy of windows sold? If not, how did MS get their hands on it, and why did they decide to use this out-dated stack?
* Also.. WIth NetBEUI being open sourced.. what are the odds that ALL kinds of bugs are gonna be discovered with Windows Networkig (ie. New Security Issues)?
* What are the odds that Microsoft will now HAVE to embrace Open Source to at the very least fix their New NetBEUI security holes?
* And if Microsoft had the source-code themselves as part of their agreement with Procom (Or did they somehow get NetBEUI by other means?).. How come they were too lazy to fix all the security issues within the formally closed-source protocol (Assuming my theory of all kinds of security issues coming out is true), causing their clients to be majorly unhappy campers right at this moment ?
-Matthew
Technetos, Inc.
> No, because Microsoft doesn't use Procom's implementation.
:P
:)
Ahh.. I thought I was missing something. But then how can they both be called NetBEUI? How similar are the two?
More to the point.. Does Procom's implementation being open sourced affect MS's NetBEUI in any way as far as revealing something that we didn't know before when it was closed?
If this truly has nothing to do with WIndows NetBEUI.. Then my god.. your all right.. this was a completely boring thing. err.. except for you dos/netware people.
> What "New NetBEUI security holes"? And why would then then "HAVE to embrace Open Source" for this?
Remember when Quake was open sourced? All kinds of new ways to cheat.. Remember.. alot of closed-source software today are considered secure thru their obscruity. Open the source up, and 9 out of 10 something has to be secured for real.. no?
> A protocol isn't "open-source" or "closed-source", it's publicly-documented or secret, and NetBEUI falls into the former category; see this document under "The NetBIOS Frames protocol".
If protocols can't be "open-sourced".. how is it that NetBEUI is being open sourced by Procom? I seem to be confused a tad bit now..
-Matthew
..but isn't this good? I mean, Samba piggybacks SMB on top of TCP/IP, increasing packet size. Won't this let Linux do SMB natively, increasing throughput?
Yeah, but, NetBEUI isn't routable, it doesn't scale up like TCP/IP. If you're network has more than 20 or 30 clients, you're in trouble with NetBEUI.
You're going to be running TCP/IP anyway, for web access, why do you want another protocol?
NetBEUI is an old, inflexible protocol, there's a good reason it's on the dust heaps of history.
George
I don't think Procomm will get lots of fuzzy feelings from us in return. I mean, as Linux geeks, we all know that nearly nothing. But it can help someone who need it, to handle something more convenient than before. This just is one reason we choose Linux, isn't it?
So I take it you have seen the prices for most USB hubs?(70 from what I saw), and USB->printer(centronics) hookups? THAT is ridiculously expensive. Fortunately it's cheaper to just get the USB cables since most mobos(even my old mobo that housed my K5) have pins on them for the hookup. Sure, it's two ports, but better than nothing.
he also forgot to click on the link to see the obvious joke.
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Don't lead me into temptation... I can find it myself.
Yes its an old protocol. Yes its a bitch to implement on a large network, and yes no-one uses it anymore. But it is probably one of the fastest network protocols available. Between two machines over a 10 megabit ethernet connection, I get 400 kbps over TCP in Linux, 350Kbps in windows (when it works) and on NetBUI I get 575 kbps in windows.
There is something to be said for fast and light if you're just connecting a few computers and don't need very many features.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
USB is ridiculously expensive. Retail a 4 port USB card goes about $40!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I know litterally hundreds of little businesses with 2/3 people, who only really want to share files and printers... There are thousands of users out there that have the computer in their own little business just because they need it, but wouldn't know a mouse from a keyboard if they didn't read the manuals. They don't want to spend any money more than really necessary on computer stuff, let alone that they would hire someone to set it up and troubleshoot it for them...
Even with dhcp, setting up tcp/ip is a real nightmare for them under Win95/98. (The TCP/IP protocol isn't installed automatically with windows 95, remember). The sheer number of options is very confusing, let alone that one could do it with static IPs without knowing what the heck these numbers mean. They want to give these computers names, not numbers.
For those computer illiterates, an appliance like the Cobalt Qube, with NetBEUI support would be a real plug-n-play solution, because there really is no setting up NetBEUI. Just to store their files, and get to use one printer from different computers. That's all they really need, and all they should be worried about.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
[Zappa]
I get upwards of 800KBps on 10baseT between my two OS/2 boxes, and one of them is an old P90. Both of them have decent busmastering cards (3com 3c900 and Linksys 10/100) and good quality CAT-5 cabling. That might have something to do with your relatively slow performance.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
This is NOT a MS product so how do you figure MS GPL'd NetBEUI?
whoever mod'ed this one up is a dumbass also.
Well well.. ProComm is a few years late on joining the open source KREW but alas, better late then never. Though I find NETBEUI basically useless, meaning I have no need for it, it is always good to hear more people joining the open source coalition or whatever it is called this year. Kudos for Procomm
Not strictly routable, but close. NetBEUI can be moved between Token Ring segments using the Source Route Bridging mechanism. I work for an organisation that has over 3,000 nodes on a single LAN with one router, which although it suffers from a high degree of broadcast traffic, is generally quite stable.
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Paul Gillingwater
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
on my good ol' 10baseT home network, I used to use TCP/IP for absolutely everything.. including file sharing. what I found out is that using NETBEUI as a protocol for file sharing speeds things up 100fold or more!! no joke!! so this could really speed things up.
:-)
this could be good news
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Windows does support host route. Try the command-line "route" command.
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314-15-9265
I should have. I was in a rush to get out the door. BTW: I have verified that the Cable Modems that my cable co uses just bridges TCP/IP. They are oblivious to other protocols. (FYI: They are made buy COM21 and are not DOCSIS compliant. :( )
--- RANT MODE ON ---
Ok, then you tell me how you can use NetBEUI, a non-routeable protocol, to attack some one in another state. Better yet, how about the Internet user down the street from you... Can't think of a way, no wonder BECAUSE YOU CAN'T.
Definition of non-routeable: CANNOT PASS THROUGH ROUTERS!
I repeat...this is not some TCP/IP port service, it is a n-e-t-w-o-r-k p-r-o-t-o-c-o-l.
--- RANT MODE OFF ---
2 days ago i purchased a cheap motherboard, with the intention of evaluating it with the intention of building a small cluster (beowulf style, but with more specific computational goals).
I found a whole bunch of motherboards with on-board everything, including video, and 10/100 network cards, with boot roms.. The guy in the shop said "sure, linux will boot it fine", but as it turns out (after much packet sniffing in ethereal), these motherboards are using the Remote Program Load (0xFC) op of something called NetBEUI, a dying extension of a dead (novell) protocol.
All of yesterday I was thinking i had this junk motherboard on my hands, but if i can ever find the source for this NetBEUI for linux thingo, then hopefully I will be able to get this motherboard to boot, and then i start travelling to the land of cheap clustered computing.
Basically, my point is that although NetBEUI may be dead, some hardware manufacturers have opted for it as a cheap standard (even though it is not publicly spec'ed), over much nicer protocols such as bootp/tftp. I would love to find motherboards that support non-proprietary protocols, but at this point in time, my wallet can't support that.
:wq ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
One nifty application for NetBeui is that is needed for another nasty MS protocol: NetDDE.
Why would you want DDE, sameone could ask?
Well, most Real-Time Financial Workstations such as Bloombergs or Reuters share real-time data with applications in the same or other workstations through NetDDE.
If you had NetBeui on Linux, you could in theory implement a NetDde Client and therefore give linux spreadsheets one more feature.
Why is all this useful?
Well, in the financial world, most boxes are, you guessed, WinNT.
Until now, at least. NetBeui for Linux could change this.
Although NetBEUI is the default protocol with many versions of MS products, any serious NT network uses TCP/IP, not NetBEUI... So I don't think implementing NetBEUI under Linux will make it closer to NT.
Everybody uses TCP/IP anyway, except on very small private LAN's (home users who don't know a thing about protocols and don't need internet access to all their computers).
Ceci n'est pas une signature
This is a sucky protocol. It won't route, which means that to get it from one LAN to another you must bridge. That means you have to use spanning tree protocol to prevent bridging loops which cause broadcast storms (you'll still get broadcast storms, but from other causes) and that means you have very non-optimal packet-flow and slow adaptation to topology changes.
Stick with NetBIOS over TCP/IP - it's cleaner, with far less broadcasting, it's internet-useable and it's here now. And it's very interoperable w/ winblows - that's how Samba does it.
- Bob Niederman http://bob-n.com
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
George,
Im not trying to be a net flame, but X.25 is a layer 2 protocol like frame relay, ISDN and xDSL. TCP/IP works on every layer but layer 2 (if you include stuff like telnet.. ya know layer 7 stuff)
The US back bone origanaly was HDLC (or someother awful frame type... not that HDLC is bad) at layer 2... not TCP/IP.
This has been something I've desired for sometime. It's nice to see wider networking support for linux.
But unfortunately some older dos software only supports netbeui network connections. (Yes we should've upgraded them, but it works)
Suddenly, there was a terrible roar all around us, and the sky was filled with what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car. And a voice was screaming, "Holy Jesus, what are these goddamned animals?"
Interesting question: Is USB really cheaper than Ethernet? I imagine that there are huge economies of scale going for ethernet right now, and while USB is building, I don't see it hitting the same numbers as ethernet. Anyone know off hand the cost of a usb asic v. an ethernet asic?
Well, jsut quickly looking up add-on cards at compusa, the cheapest USB card that I could find was $39.99, while the cheapest ethernet card that I could find was $14.99. Granted, since more computers come with usb than ethernet, there's probably higher volume of pci ethernet cards than usb ones, but that's a pretty significant price difference.
USB
Ethernet
Sure, we could've used TCP/IP, but this would have meant bigger administrative work (setting up Addresses and keeping a book about the used ones) and slower throughput.
So, if you don't need a routable protocol in a 10..20 machines environment and don't mind about some broadcasts(*), NetBEUI is still a valid and viable choice.
*) And besides, even TCP/IP will heavily broadcast if no Name Server is around, and even if it is, it still has to do ARP broadcasts when the target's MAC address cannot be found in the cache.
Use The Source, Luke!
Damn ! Bowie did invent so many new musical trends, and so he invented a networking protocol too ?
What a genius !
Now, no need to wonder anymore why he is running is own IPS ! So strange it's called "BowieNet" and uses that TCP/IP thing !
Stéphane
Instant Karma's gonna get you, Gonna knock you right on the head (John Lennon, 1970)
Finally! Just what we need, better Samba -> NT compatability. If someone can hack the security features of NT and 95/98 for better Samba server connectivity, we can finally convince all the PHB's out there to install our favorite distro instead of Win2k.
Theres a utility that I use at work on our second systems, called LinNeighborhood that does exactly what you are asking for.
Stupid is as stupid dies.
I don't mean to be nttygrtty here, but virii is the latin plural of vir, which means adult man; the latin plural of virus would be viri.
($.02)
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
NetBEUI =( . Of all of the protocols to keep around. Why not bring back the Xerox PUP while we are it! Shit.
"HEY LOOKY US! - We support GPL also! Here is a trash protocol that we can give away free with out giving anything real out".
Most people never had to live through networks from hell when running un-routable protocols for there main protocols. SNA was also one of the other great ones. Had to live though countless meeting on why in the morning that every hour the network would come to a stop as a new timezone became 8:00 and a new shift of people started there PC and started Broadcast storms company wide.
The party we had when we finally got some of the major communications to IP and we shut down the bridges!!
Lame is all I have to say about this trash!
Yes I have a option! just ask!
This will be included for Wide-Area and Wireless networking.
It was not included in version 1.0 due to security concerns, but these concerns were met by draping a large tarp around the sending or recieving stations on three sides.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Usually I do 'make oldconfig'
-W.W.
"Well it should be obvious to even the most dim-witted individual who holds an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology...
seems to have been shared by a lot of folks - specifically "Yea, so?" BUT - the more I allow both of my active brain cells to massage this little nugget, the more I come to the conclusion that more Open Source stuff (maybe "broader" is a better word than "more", total volume isn't my point), the better. I mean, it's not like they're forcing this stuff on you. And doesn't this hint at future additional Linux interoperability? I don't see how *that* can be a Bad Thing (OK, the words "future" and "NETbeui" may not belong in the same sentence) One minor nit-pick: Doesn't NETbeui stand for "NETBIOS Enhanced User Interface"?????????? Even though that makes no sense to me, that's what I always thought it was....
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
Oh bother. This is the attitude that KEEPS companies from bringing out more GPL'd products.
Thats neat but do something COOL!!
No you should be saying wow THANKS ProCom for giving up your time you spent on this product!
Not This product sucks GPL something cool
Oh well.. guess we all like ot fly off at the handle.*SHRUG*
just what the world needs - more security problems - ive spent the last 3 months trying to keep my win2k on line and secure - no comment on just how bad win 9x is (im still on the learning linux part)
if you aren't very careful, esp w/ m$ liking to turn everything on, you create a security hole big enough to drive a truck through - now this wonder will be available to linux as well
netbeui and tcp/ip are a bad combination on m$ operating systems, and i can't see how it will be any better on linux (in fairness i don't work in an environment where both types of machines work together on one network)
constructive comments/corrections/criticisms welcomed. thanks.
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2
don't laugh too hard - it was only "officially" phased out feb 99. quite simply, it worked.
.02c on a favorite if irrelevant topic
hams still use it
give me a network protocol that is as simple and works everytime, even when nothing else does.
anyway my
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2
You have NetBIOS over NetBEUI, NetBIOS over TCP/IP and NetBIOS over IPX/SPX - Nwlink. I really don't remember the difference/relationship between NetBEUI and the Server Message Block protocol though.
The only thing this is good for, is if you want to run Linux with NetBEUI instead of TCP/IP, but who would want such a perverse thing. Maybe this code could help the samba team understand NetBIOS/NetBEUI even better?
Even though NetBEUI might not be the coolest thing around, I think you should stop whining. It is after all GPL'ed. This thing is a good thing for having compatability with legacy networks. Last time I checked, NetBEUI also has a smaller overhead than TCP/IP making it faster on a small LAN.
But isnt BetBEUI routable on a Token Ring Network? Rumor has it, as it was originally an IBM invention, it WAS designed to be routable on TR. If this is true, then who knows? You could have a new project spring up that allows routable NetBEUI on a standard Ethernet LAN. openBLOOEY?
JB
Feed The Need[goatse.cx]
What's next, punch card readers for Linux, drum memory interfaces?
I hope so, I think it'd be fun to have them laying around. "Not only can it store 20MB, but I can also make it walk to the door!"
--Josh
There are exactly 42,935,718 letter sized sheets in a square mile.
no more than IPX is a Novell "product".
Microsoft has GPL'd the NetBEUI protocol! :-)
Uh, not exactly
%DCL-E-OPENIN, error openingDISK$3:[Sjev]LIFE;
-RMS-E-LNF, life not found
Microsoft wasn't the first to use it commercially. I know IBM was using it before MS, and I think there may have been others.
Screw Micro$oft.
It's nice to see another company releasing their stuff for linux. Course this isn't something particulary useful to me. NetBEUI for those of you who don't know is the low level stack used by Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Win9x. The protocol is on the same level as TCP/IP. NetBIOS is the higher level SMB file transport protocol (on the same level as FTP). NetBIOS can run on NetBEUI, TCP/IP and even IPX. Samba is a linux program that provides linux support for NetBIOS over TCP/IP. NetBEUI has never been supported by linux. My guess is that the company wanted to use linux for the CDROM servers and other products, but needed to provide NetBEUI file protocol support also, so they coded it themselves and now, figure it'll be good Public Relations to release it (and it is). NetBEUI is actually FASTER than TCP/IP because it has a much lower overhead. But it is not routable so it can only reside on individual LANs. NetBEUI makes a good solution for small workgroups where TCP/IP is not needed, however, it can cause problems when mixed with other protocols and isn't as managable as TCP/IP. So there's my 2 cents.
You can have my dog's poo for free.
"Even very small LAN's now use TCP/IP. NetBEUI is a thing of the past. And where it is used, it is usually used incorrectly. I remember a large corporate network that bridged NetBEUI to over 2,000 nodes and hired me for big bucks to determine why their network was so unstable. Duh" Not true. While possibly ina 2,000 node stack you might experience stability issues NetBEUI is just as or even more stable than TCP/IP stacks in smaller LANs.
If you set this up, on its own interface, you can "firewall" the NIC.
If your scale is small enough, the DB can be a single-machine, connected by a cross-over cable!
TCP is wonderfull. But it is a CPU eater! Especially under heavy connection loads.
NT certainly benefits by using NetBEUI in this situation. The payoff is lesser for Linux, but it doesn't hurt, either...
--Jeremiah
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
EXACTLTY!
I was about to make this point, when I saw your post. NetBEUI is a non-routable protocol, which makes a perfect little link for things like Web 2 DB.
This is how I have protected the NT-based projects around this shop. This works bets on a dedicated NIC, and small, dumb-hub. Then NetBIOS chattiness is isolated from your IP network.
--Jeremiah
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Again, the idea is that while it's not going to be used in a large-scale network environment, it'll be handy to have for people in quirky, highly-underfunded environments where Linux is probably already attractive due to low resource requirements and compatibility with older, less common hardware.
Second, the more network protocols Linux supports, the more likely it is that someone'll invent a protocol-independent wrapper that'll let you run a server or client over any protocol you like, transparently.
(Hey! I think it'd be neat if you could run a web-server over a NetBEUI connection, through an AppleTalk firewall, over a DECNet LAN, via an Econet router, onto a TCP/IP network, without any of the computers or software packages at either end caring what anything else used.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Under Linux, the commands would look something like this (this is off the top of my head. YMMV. IANAL. IYHDBUIANR (if your hard drive blows up I am not responsible):
(those commands are probably wrong. Subnet calculations like that are a pain in the neck and I'm too lazy to check them).The only downside would be that all your traffic would still go out over the cable modem. To fix that (mostly), trade in your hub on a switch. Switches are getting really cheap nowadays.
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
No, because Microsoft doesn't use Procom's implementation.
Discovered by reading the source code? Probably not many, as a lot of the code path for handling SMB is probably in the SMB code, not the NetBEUI code - and, as indicated, the code Procom is GPLing probably isn't the code Microsoft are using (unless they licensed it from Microsoft, which I think is extremely unlikely).
What "New NetBEUI security holes"? And why would then then "HAVE to embrace Open Source" for this?
Yeah, they got it by other means, i.e. writing an implementation thereof.
A protocol isn't "open-source" or "closed-source", it's publicly-documented or secret, and NetBEUI falls into the former category; see this document under "The NetBIOS Frames protocol".
Well, if multiple vendors independently implement the same protocol, they can use the name of that protocol for their implementation.
As I said in my previous message, these are two presumably independent implementations of the same protocol.
(Whether "NetBEUI" is the correct name for the protocol is another matter; the IBM spec that documents it calls it "the NetBIOS Frames Protocol", and Microsoft calls it "NetBEUI Frame" in the Windows NT Server Networking Guide document in the NT Server Resource Kit:
but that's another matter.)
It is an independent implementation of the same protocol, so it does have something to do with it. It just doesn't share code with it.
This doesn't ipso facto mean that there will be any new security holes (besides, the protocol was documented), and doesn't ipso facto mean that Microsoft would have to "embrace Open Source" to deal with those, unless by "embrace Open Source" you mean something other than what is normally meant by "embrace Open Source", i.e. open-source their protocol implementation.
Because what they're open-sourcing is their implementation of an existing, documented protocol. They are NOT "open-sourcing" the protocol itself - the protocol is already publicly documented. Given that, I think that it's incorrect to say that they're "open-sourcing NetBEUI", just as it's incorrect to say that Berkeley, for example, "open-sourced TCP"; it's correct to say that they're open-sourcing their implementation of the NetBEUI (or NetBEUI Frame, or whatever) protocol.
Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, I guess, but more pleasant might be a combination of smbfs and an automounter that understood SMB (knew which SMB servers had announced themselves to the browser, knew how to query an SMB server to see what shares it was offering) - that would let you use the KDE 1 file manager, or the KDE 2 file manager, or GMC, or Nautilus, or ls, or... as SMB browsers.
A DOS client can be useful in some cases. Diskless workstations have already been mentioned. Our PABX runs under DOS, now I can let it write its logfiles to a Linux machine for processing!
I tried that with NetBIOS over TCP/IP (LANMAN, MSClient) but its footprint was too big: lots of TSRs gobble up memory which did not leave enough room for the PABX software.
And yes, as you can see on my homepage I have tried several DOS clients with Samba. The only DOS client which looks nice (little low memory usage) is the IBM LAN client but the specs say it only works with original IBM network cards. However, I got tipped that you can actually use any NDIS2 driver. Dunno if that is true, but at least I now have two options!
So all in all, I can't wait to get my hands on this one!
-------
Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
Samba 2 does have PDC support. It's BDC and domain trust relationships that it needs right now. IntelliMirror tech would be nice too (directory replication). This won't help further any of those goals.. it'll just allow linux to have backwards combatability with other windows products. Which is nice, but it won't help Samba.
SunRays redirect their USB over 100Mb ethernet, and there is no latency at all til the load average starts pushing 120 on the server (at which point we start killing netscape processes -- not like they don't crash at random anyway)
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Samba doesn't use netbeui -- it uses netbios on TCP/IP.
I have a home network with a bunch of windoze and linux boxes, and I use samba on the linux boxes and Windows file sharing (i.e. netbios) on the windows boxes, but I have only TCP/IP turned on--this is a 100% NETBEUI free zone.
--
This is not a flame. I am a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer/Microsoft Certified Trainer. I am not an OS bigot (I also run Linux, MacOS, AmigaDOS, and OPENSTEP), so no flames, please...:) I just have to say one thing: NetBEUI sucks. I mean, for Chrissakes, it's a BROADCAST based protocol. Even with MS machines, the stack has to pull EVERY packet all the way up to the Application Layer of the OSI model to check whether or not the machine name matches it's own! I mean, we already have a fast, well desgined protocol to run our networks on (TCP/IP) and a way to make it almost zero-administration (DHCP/BOOTP).
I preach in my classes that unmitigated broadcasts (i.e. anything but ARP or DHCP initialization) are EVIL. They suck your most precious resource - bandwidth - like a hungry vampire.
NetBEUI is even more evil because you have a choice NOT to use it and use TCP/IP.
The only reason to use it is for MS-DOS clients...and I would segment them away from my network using a dual homed machine with TCP/IP bound to one adapter card (to the main network) and NetBEUI bound to the other (to the DOS machines).
NetBEUI's dead, folks. Don't pollute the efficiency of *NIX with this crap.
Kevin W. Bunn, MCSE/MCT
MCP ID # 1198191
My posts don't reflect the opinion of my employer, and my employer's opinion doesn't influence the content of my posts.
3: (Cable modems again). Screwey Cable Cos can put different machines on the same modem onto different class Cs. This makes TCP/IP really bad for moving data arround because you are limited to you modem bandwidth.
what you just said doesn't even make sense, secondly, you are limited to the bandwidth of the line attached to the cable modem, and lastly, under what circumstance would you not be limited to the bandwidth of your line?
what he's trying to say is, because the subnets are different, all data from one machine sent to another on the same hub will be sent through the cable modem... unless the modem is smart enough to route those back without sending through the cable line, the packets will go out to the router and back again.
with two machines on the same subnet, the cable modem isn't even involved in the connection
dennis
j. scott olsson
Yes! In fact NETBEUI is more efficient than TCP/IP for DB connections (many set-up and tear down events which are expensive in TCP/IP, especially on NT). Some NT people doing this for DB back ends to web sites already.
We still are using mission critical apps that use NetBEUI as part of a data gathering and distribution system for scientific experiments. A DOS box collects the data and distributes it to NT clients (using NetBEUI) for further processing. The apps are closed and proprietary, so we don't have much choice about the networking. :(
However, if we can get this supported by VMWare, we can allow the currently dual booting analysis stations to remain in Linux mode all the time (which is what we prefer).
Time to check into the source, and fire off a request to VMware...
So, to us, this is potentially far from useless.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
OS/2 v1.2, I think - I could have grabbed it, but really, what good would it have been?
Try smbclient
2: For people on cable modems, NetBEUI is a better protocol for file sharing because it doesn't get spewed out to the entire network.
My cablemodem (and the cable modems of everybody I know) is a bridge, not a router, so the NetBEUI and IPX traffic gets spewed out, choking off the neighbor's bandwidth.
Other manufacturers may make cablemodems that are routers, but mine (Terapro) and those of most of my friends (Motorola) are bridges, which means that NetBEUI would indeed be propagated.
I know that client.
It does not support dns or even wins (or NetBEUI for that matter) and it uses lots of room.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
The costs that I was figuring in were in the devices themselves (i.e. printer, mouse, keybd, etc). I can find USB mice for $15-20 (albeit not great ones - but an MS PS/2 mouse runs much more), and 4 port USB hubs for $16... the outboard devices can be real cheap. Just about every motherboard has USB support now, so it's really not a big deal that way. You could even calculate in that $7-50 savings for not buying an ethernet card, using yor model. The question is the ASICs in the peripheral, and how that price compares to a similar ethernet ASIC... which may be very prevalent, but are far more complicated with communications, and can be overkill for a lot of things.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Check pricewatch - you can find 4 port USB hubs for $16... for $18 you can get a colored one to match your iWhack... harldy $70... There are a number of printers that directly support USB - I wouldn't think a conversion there would save you all that much, since the USB link would still have to do all of the transfers at parallel speed, which is what your computer wants to avoid... I don't think I've ever even seen a kludge box of that nature 8^) Ethernet -> parallel cards with buffers or network printers with memory provide a nicer solution - one quick transfer. File and forget, so to speak. If the USB converter had some memory, then that would alleviate much of it, but it's not a very clean solution...
Two ports work well for most people... What someone needs to do is make a keyboard with a built in hub (maybe only one port) for the mouse (kinda Macstyle)... saves a port on the back of the box, after all. Just a thought... I'm sure there's one out there.........
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Yes, it's an old protocol. Yes, nobody in their right mind wants it on their network. But, along with TokenRing, DECNET, TCP/IP, IPX, and Appletalk, if we add NetBEUI, we get to be the glue that holds the network together. That's not a bad way to force your way into the server room...
www.eFax.com are spammers
I thought Samba already managed NetBEUI interoperability pretty well. What kind of improvements does this bring to the table?
What Samba really needs is the ability to run as a Primary Domain Controller. Will this contribution help meet that goal?
Hmm... well, IP was invented before NetBEUI, no?
:)
SEAL
I am yet again amazed that the /. crowd, which seems to be have a large Open Source/Linux crowd, would criticize a post such as this one. One of great hallmarks of linux is it's compatibility to older stuff, especially hardware. Try running the latest m$ OS on an old piece of hardware on an old network and see just how well it does. At least with linux you have a chance. Why should people care if someone decides to Open Source xyz protocol? You're certainly not forced to use it. Most likely it will be of benefit to someone, even if it is to see where someone else went wrong. :) I know this is flamebait.
..but isn't this good? I mean, Samba piggybacks SMB on top of TCP/IP, increasing packet size. Won't this let Linux do SMB natively, increasing throughput?
If my server is sending out X+Y size packets (X is the TCP/IP wrapper, Y is data) wouldn't it be better to just be sending Y size packets instead? This will make Linux that much closer to NT in terms of raw speed at the high end. You're not sending out larger packets, either to the server or the clients.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
cool! Now Linux can join in with the M$ Boxes to flood the network with excessive NetBlooey traffic. Can you say 'Packet Collision'? I knew you could.
On the upside, it will make Linux even easier to setup in small networks, where TCP/IP is not required..... Where you would find this scenario, I do not know.....
Just my 0.06CAD worth...
Feed The Need[goatse.cx]
Have they told us how to pronounce it yet?
No, Procom have GPLed an implementation of the NetBEUI protocol, specificat ions for which have been available for a while. (Look in "The NetBIOS Frames Protocol" section of the IBM document in question - yes, IBM, who were involved in it, as well as in SMB.)
Broadcasts suck NOT because they suck bandwidth. Most LAN's broadcast bandwidth is a small fraction of the availabe bandwidth, but may still have a significant broadcast problem.
:) ). And broadcasts are forwarded on to ALL stations on a LAN, so all stations take that performance hit. Multicasts are like broadcasts, but the NIC card can be told to only subscribe to the multicast addresses it wants, so it doesn't have to process what it is not interested in.
When an ethernet card receives a frame, it evaluates whether or not the machine is interested. The frame is important and requires processing if one of the following happens:
1. The destination address of the frame is the MAC address of the ethernet card (unicast)
2. The destination address of the frame is a broadcast
3. The destination address is a multicast the ethernet adapter is interested in
An "interesting" frame results in the ethernet card generating an interrupt, which the OS must then decapsulate and analyze, even if the OS is truly not interested. Broadcasts generate a large number of "interesting" packets for the nic card, which triggers a large number of interrupts on the PC, which in turn takes CPU cycles away from other important tasks (like SETI@home
A side note....If I remember correctly, this was the initial problem with the first DOOM. The first version of DOOM used broadcasts, which killed all stations on that LAN, even if they weren't running a network protocol. A later patch updated DOOM to use unicasts instead.
NetBIOS over IP applications, like SAMBA, has the same issues. It generates broadcasts to announce "i have these services", "wheres workgroup so-and-so?", etc., etc. The saving grace of Netbios over IP is the functionality of WINS (Windows Internet Name Service, the netbios equivalent of DNS...just less scalable). With WINS, stations can register and look up other hosts on the network WITHOUT using broadcasts.
If you run Netbios Over IP on a sizeable network, across routers, or both, USE WINS. Or enable WINS resolution via DNS. And disable NetBEUI and NetBIOS over IPX. If you run NetBIOS over multiple protocols, it will broadcast over each of those. Yuck. Bye-bye network.
--
John Kramer
John Kramer
God may be my co-pilot, but the devil is my backseat driver.
Sweet jesus, do you know what this means? It means I just lost atleast a dozen bets with my friends... I have to go shave my head bald now... good grief... it's 70 and balmy in hell right now!
And in a related story Tesla LLC filed suit against Marconi Corp for improper use of Patented materials. Tesla LLC claims that Marconi Corp. used their patented algorythms in the creation of the "Morse Code" protocol stack and will appear in Court on Friday seeking a priliminary injunction.
Both Tesla LLC and Marconi Corp. were unavailable for comment.
Guys... forget the RIAA and MPAA lawsuits we all have to come out in force for this one. Can you imagine what would happen if we lost? The precedent that gets set? Please... buy the t-shirts that copyleft is producing showing the "Morse Code" translation algorythm! Support the EFF and lets get our voices heard.
:)
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
>Ethernet will even allow you to run both 10 and 100 Mbps devices on thesame medium.
Yes, but not at the same time...you can choose one or the other for each connection. There are, of course, hubs and switches that convert the two so that your network can have both, but it's not quite the same thing.
I don't see why I'd want my mouse over (even a personal) ethernet (that's only connected to my computer). More latency is bad - I expect and demand immediate response from my pointing device... no slowdowns are acceptable. Network printers are quite common and have been for years, though not in a home setting. There are many outboard ethernet -> parallel converters, and the smarter printers have internal cards for them - a net printer with 32/64/128MB of ram is definitely the way to go, in terms of not sapping resources (parallel ports are aweful, USB better).
Mice need clocking and power, and you can't duplicate that over standard ethernet. An interesting idea, though.
USB is one big shared interrupt for all of your peripherals - so there's no need for an extra network connection, and it should save at least one or two IRQs (serial and parallel - leaving one serial open).
As for the relative pricing, I'd say USB is a lower cost solution for most things - not much translating and address matching. Much less hardware. Very little protocol overhead (as opposed to a LAN). Stands to reason the amount of hardware should reflect this.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I for one could sure use NetBEUI under Linux. Here's why:
I've got a 10Mb LAN set up at home with two computers, and the hub also hooks up to a cable modem. I am paying for two IP addresses from my cable company (don't ask me why I'm not using masquerading. Both machines are dual-boot, and it's too much a pain. Besides, technically I'm not allowed to do masquerading anyway).
The problem is that the two IP's always end up being on different subnets (I don't know why Videotron does this to me. It's DHCP, and they say that they can't do anything about it)! This means that for the two machines to talk to each other over TCP, packets have to actually leave my LAN, travel over the cable modem to the router, and then back through the cable modem to the other machine.
However, with NetBEUI my problem is solved, and I can transfer files from one machine to the other without having the packets routed out of my LAN and back in again.
-- Will quantum computers run imaginary-time operating systems?
There are a few good reasons for NetBEUI. Here are a couple:
1: It's not TCP/IP and it's not routeable, therefore non attackable unless you are on the same network.
2: For people on cable modems, NetBEUI is a better protocol for file sharing because it doesn't get spewed out to the entire network.
3: (Cable modems again). Screwey Cable Cos can put different machines on the same modem onto different class Cs. This makes TCP/IP really bad for moving data arround because you are limited to you modem bandwidth.
4: A brain-dead AOL user can set it up.
Nuf Said.
Even very small LAN's now use TCP/IP. NetBEUI is a thing of the past. And where it is used, it is usually used incorrectly. I remember a large corporate network that bridged NetBEUI to over 2,000 nodes and hired me for big bucks to determine why their network was so unstable. Duh.
Screw Micro$oft.
Our site (a university in Oxford, but not the Oxford University) ran on NETBEUI for years and years. It was already well established when I joined in 1991, and some very privileged folk had network connections on - gasp - "the backbone" (a bit of coax that ran through ceiling voids and through the ducts between the buildings).
We ran Lan Manager 2.0 with one server (running Microsoft OS/2!) and forty DOS/Windows 3.0 clients. We evaluated and immediately rejected TCP/IP because (a) the server-side stack made the server blow up and (b) the client-side stack consisted of umpteen little TSRs which together left enough real-mode memory to run EDLIN. I should also point out that we British had brilliantly chosen X25 rather than TCP/IP as our national network protocol so the Internet dawned rather late here.
NETBEUI was succesful here for three reasons. Firstly it was "on" in a default installation of server and client. Secondly it was chatty and self-discovering, a bit like Appletalk (another technically crappy protocol that nevertheless made life easy when doing small setups). Thirdly it was monolithic and small in memory.
Now you aren't supposed to go above about 200 nodes in a bridged environment like this, as any fule kno, but we eventually had about 2,000 nodes running NETBEUI quite happily. It was only last summer that we finally got around to implementing VLANS on the central Cisco - and this brought the house down, as Microsoft's SMB clients (in 3.11 and 95) are pretty broken when it comes to working on vanilla TCP/IP with just a minimal LMHOSTS file and DNS support (we didn't want to use WINS).
Nowadays NETBEUI only operates in one of our VLANS, the one containing the main servers and the public PC labs. We've recently been remote-booting 95 using Lanworks ROMs and BOOTP. They load a floppy disk image which has the real-mode Lan Manager client (including NETBEUI), do a bit of hard disk integrity checking/maintenance, then whack the real-mode client on the head, vapourise the virtual A: drive, and execute Windows 95.
Works like a charm.
SO... what is the effect of this announcement on us? Well, back in the days of DEC we bought several big Alphas. We've been feeling pretty annoyed since Compaq/Microsoft ended development on this platform. Now, assuming that SAMBA gets modified to play nicely with this NETBEUI stack, we can give them a new lease of life by running Linux on them instead.
george
Could NetBEUI over Ethernet be a replacement for USB? Just name your mouse "mouse", your printer "printer", etc. You could plug it into a dedicated network card, a hub, or even directly into the network. I know they can make the cables reasonably thin, they do it for PCMCIA cards already.
How is USB any better than ethernet? Ethernet will even allow you to run both 10 and 100 Mbps devices on the same medium. I suppose the only thing you loose is the ability to line-power devices. With PCI you should even be able to share interrupts.
What's cheaper these days, an ethernet IC, or a USB IC?
As many have mentioned already, this product is so old and out-dated, no one really wants it. However, it allows Procomm to get a free image-enhancement with the Open-Source community. They give away something they don't want anyway, and in return, get lots of fuzzy feelings from us Linux geeks. I'm waiting for the day when a company like this GPLs a serious application that's actually worth something. Then, I'll be impressed.
Don't dis them for doing something we, as Free software advocates, have been asking companies to do -- namely giving mothballed products to everyone rather than hoarding them.
Even if NetBEUI isn't viable anymore, it has value as an Open Source application:
Opening code that companies no longer value is more than just good PR -- it's a valuable practice, and it should be encouraged on general principal.
phil
In a move that rocked the open source community, the Marconi Corp. today announced plans to GPL their "Morse Code" telegraphy protocol stack, formerly widely used for telegram transmission. "Now that we have our entire office on the open TCP/IP protocol, we felt it was time to 'give back' to the community", said Paul J. Oldtimer III, his wrist still twitching from a long session at the key. "Our Morse Code Stack is the best in the business, with centuries of development and debugging that has left it the most mature protocol available."
Not all agreed that this boon to humanity was a welcome offer. "Telegraphy?!?" bellowed Peter D. Spittle, a Linux enthusiast and Networking consultant to the International Megabuck Banking consortium. "Who the heck uses that anymore in a competitive business environment? Maybe as a slow secure-channel protocol to thwart crackers busting in on your IP router, but for everyday use the manual routing personnel can delay packets for as long as an hour, depending on coffee breaks".
However, officials for the Marconi Corp. insist it is still a relevant protocol. "Look, say the line between Witchata and Flagstaff goes down, you can still get a ticker tape of the message to our guy on a horse who'll get it thru! The message must get thru!!", repeated Mr. Oldtimer, slumping in his chair as the whiskey bottle fell to the floor.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
A lot of people would like to be able to boot diskless DOS/Win95/Win98 boxes from a Linux server. There isn't a functional way to do that using TCP/IP. Yeah, there are some DOS IP stacks but using them prevents IP from working once Windows boots up.
Currently the only real way to handle it is using Netware shares. But now it should be possible to do it with NetBEUI instead... a preferable solution for booting a Microsoft OS (call it evil if you want.) At home, this will let me run my Windows box without a hard drive just by hanging it off my Linux machine.
Heck, this would be useful if only to recover a crashed Windows box without a rescue disk. :)
NetBEUI is not dead yet!
The fact is, someone will use it. How many times do you hit "n" when you're configuring your kernel? Lot's I'll bet. I know I do. I really don't give a crap about "Amateur Radio AX.25 Level 2 protocol", and yet somehow it snuck its way into my config script. So what? I just hit "n", and then forget about it.
Just because you don't (or the majority of users doesn't) care about a particular feature, it doesn't mean that there's not a place for it.
I'll be the first to tell you to get rid of Netbeui from your main network but there is one thing you can use it for.
In a DMZ you can setup a web server and use netbeui to connect to a resource server in the same DMZ and keep your resource server safe from several types of hacks, not perfect but still gives old netbeui a job
The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data.