I don't think that NetBIOS over TCP will handle more than the first listed IP address. That's a reflection of the age of the NetBIOS protocol. I wonder if it would work if you disable NetBIOS over TCP, and use the more recent SMB over TCP, which operates on TCP port 445. That would require that all the machines involved are running Win2K or later. Also, if there's a WINS server that has machines from both networks registered, and itself has addresses on both networks, it might work - but only if there's a router that will pass traffic between the two networks, even though they're on the same LAN.
I think you might be right on NetBIOS. I can ping out to both networks and DNS/TCP/IP based services seem to work fine. All the machines are Win XP or Server 2003. For various work related reasons I can't provision a WINS server on the server. I've never used SMB and don't know much about it. Do you know of anywhere on the web I can read a clear explination?
"SMB" is the "Server Message Block" protocol that's used for Windows Networking. So it's actually been there all along, but in earlier versions of Windows, it was intertwined with NetBIOS. Originated by IBM and enhanced several times by Microsoft, NetBIOS was originally transported over NetBEUI, a completely unrouteable transport protocol. One of Microsoft's enhancements was allowing NetBIOS traffic to be transported over TCP.
Here's a
Microsoft Knowledge Base article explaining the use of TCP/445 by Win2K and later systems. A detail I'd forgotten is that disabling NetBIOS over TCP removes the need for WINS, as long as there's a DNS server available for name resolution. The article points out that it's possible to disable NetBIOS over TCP in the DHCP option settings sent to DHCP clients.
This article describes how to set that up using Microsoft's DHCP server.
I've never had a "pure" Win2K or later network to try this on, so I don't know whether there are any pitfalls. If you decide to try this, please post back with the results.
Yep, that should have worked, and, best of all, it did! It's kind of a pain, because it prevents central administration of the NetBIOS namespace. But if all the IP addresses are static, that's not a problem.
Thank you all for your help. With the sugestions and comments I was able to figure out that only the NetBIOS services were broken, the TCP/IP services worked just fine. By configuring an LMHosts file on each machine (content details below) I was able to use the Map Network Drive tool in Windows Explorer to set up my file shareing. It doesn't show up in the Network Neighborhood but it is enough for my purposes.
Thank you one and all
Details:
The Machine with two IP address needs every Machine and IP address on the seccond network:
I.e. My primary network and the one with the internet gateway is 19.168.xxx.xxx . The seccond is
10.1.xxx.xxx. I can explore the 192 net with Network Neighborhood. All the 10, macxhines are
listed in LMHosts.
All the other 10. machines have the name and IP address (the 10. address) of the machine with 2 IP address.
jmwills
2 Intern
•
12K Posts
0
October 13th, 2004 23:00
jwatt
4.4K Posts
0
October 14th, 2004 00:00
I don't think that NetBIOS over TCP will handle more than the first listed IP address. That's a reflection of the age of the NetBIOS protocol. I wonder if it would work if you disable NetBIOS over TCP, and use the more recent SMB over TCP, which operates on TCP port 445. That would require that all the machines involved are running Win2K or later. Also, if there's a WINS server that has machines from both networks registered, and itself has addresses on both networks, it might work - but only if there's a router that will pass traffic between the two networks, even though they're on the same LAN.
Jim
minorMaster
3 Posts
0
October 14th, 2004 14:00
I think you might be right on NetBIOS. I can ping out to both networks and DNS/TCP/IP based services seem to work fine. All the machines are Win XP or Server 2003. For various work related reasons I can't provision a WINS server on the server. I've never used SMB and don't know much about it. Do you know of anywhere on the web I can read a clear explination?
Thank you for your help.
jwatt
4.4K Posts
0
October 14th, 2004 15:00
"SMB" is the "Server Message Block" protocol that's used for Windows Networking. So it's actually been there all along, but in earlier versions of Windows, it was intertwined with NetBIOS. Originated by IBM and enhanced several times by Microsoft, NetBIOS was originally transported over NetBEUI, a completely unrouteable transport protocol. One of Microsoft's enhancements was allowing NetBIOS traffic to be transported over TCP.
Here's a Microsoft Knowledge Base article explaining the use of TCP/445 by Win2K and later systems. A detail I'd forgotten is that disabling NetBIOS over TCP removes the need for WINS, as long as there's a DNS server available for name resolution. The article points out that it's possible to disable NetBIOS over TCP in the DHCP option settings sent to DHCP clients. This article describes how to set that up using Microsoft's DHCP server.
I've never had a "pure" Win2K or later network to try this on, so I don't know whether there are any pitfalls. If you decide to try this, please post back with the results.
Jim
jwatt
4.4K Posts
0
October 15th, 2004 16:00
Thanks for the update!
Jim
minorMaster
3 Posts
0
October 15th, 2004 16:00