Sometimes I have the following problem to deal with: An OS/2 system uses NetBIOS over TCP/IP (aka TCPBEUI) and should communicate with a SMB server (likewise using TCPBEUI) on a different subnet. This does not work on OS/2 out of the box without a little bit of help.
↫ Michal Necasek
My 40° fever certainly isn’t helping, but goes way over my head. Still, it seems like an invaluable article for a small group of people, and anyone playing with OS/2 and networking from here on out can refer back this excellent and detailed explanation.
It’s probably the fever, Thom. I have no issue understanding it, even though I never even used OS/2, and I’m not that good with networking.
I’ve never heard of TCPBEUI.
Long ago we’d often use “NetBEUI” though. It helped users find other computers over the network and connect to them via their names without otherwise using any sort of directory server.
https://networkencyclopedia.com/netbeui/
Think in terms of shares…
\\lisa\shares
\\bob\c$
\’\tony\printer
I was just going to say that! Is that the same as NetBEUI?
NetBEUI/NetBIOS is (was) a protocol for small scale local networks running on top of ethernet physical layer, and it is (was) non routable
.
TCPBEUI is basically the BEUI protocol running on top of TCP/IP with the hope/goal of allowing it to be routable through TCP based infrastructure. But there are issues in terms of the different addressing modes: e.g. NetBEUI uses node name as the “address” (the node name maps directly to a specific MAC ethernet address). I think it did a lot of node/address discovery by broadcast. Also its native packets don’t align 100% with TCP/IP
So I assume there is a lot of hackery involved to get that on top of TCP/IP and make it routable across subnets, when it was never intended to be so.
Yep, except NETBEUI ran over NETBIOS protocol, kinda like 3coms lanman. TCPBEUI is same kinda deal except running over TCP/IP. In the end the higher level sharing protocol that does the sharing and addressing was always called SMB. Thats where the name SAMBA came from for the daemon that did the same thing on Linux.
IIRC, Windows systems used the “WINS” server for this. That was a rather annoying thing to manage in a complex environment with “tombstoned” records and all.
Then again DNS is not always a picnic either…
I recall some equipment vendors adopting OS/2 because the promise was NETBEUI over TCP was supposed to be much simpler and easier to setup and manage in a mixed platform environment, that was the claim, reality was something entirely different. Back then of course the hardware side of networking was very different, pre-Linux with the likes of Novell, IBM and Unix dominant in the server space. The OS/2 experiment didn’t last long, a pity really because despite all the bugs it did a lot of things quite well, better than most of the earlier options.
It’s funny in some ways because the outcomes OS/2 tried to implement Linux has largely targeted, but is still yet to achieve. Perhaps it’s not as obvious as the unifying concepts suggest.
I can imagine it can be a fun exercise to get all these classic things like SMB going. In practice I tend to just use an scp client when I need to transfer files to an older system. Usually there will be something available that can be made to work with one of the SSH servers on my LAN 🙂
When I first starting actually using OS/2 as a desktop OS it was when the beta of OS/2 2.0 was given out at a presentation in the IBM building in downtown Seattle.
I had seen OS/2 1.2 which is basically a better DOS than DOS with the most benefit being that it crashed or hung a lot less often than the current version of DOS which was a pretty low standard for me.
But when I saw the presentation for the beta of OS/2 2.0 I was stunned by how great it was.
I went back to my desk and immediately set to working figuring out how to make a driver for OS/2 for Novell which is what we used. Due to severe chronic pain and the meds which give me zero bliss and only partial lessening of pain, but have severely cramped my memory, I don’t remember the details of what I did to create that driver. And I don’t remember if we were using IPX/SPX then or whether we were using TCP/IP. I wish I did but I don’t. I was just VERY thankfully that we used Novell and not microsoft (lower case on purpose) networks.
It was bad enough that we were using DOS and Win 3.1 for workgroups. We as a world should have moved completely off of Windows back then and most of the world is still paying for it with the unreliability of Windows vs what the current version of OS/2 offers.
And yes, I can make OS/2 crash any time I want. But guess what. I can make ANY and EVERY OS crash within 30 seconds. That isn’t hard. What is hard, apparently for the little minds that needed pablum, was to stop doing things that made it crash and do something different so that it didn’t.
If everyone kept doing what made Windows crash, which they do a lot, then Windows would never run. It’s as simple as that. I had OS/2 computers that I had running until the hardware died without rebooting it and using it at minimum two (2) hours every day for compiling programs, working on spreadsheets, writing (10,000 plus words a day) all on OS/2 with no problems. AND I can play retro games all I want. And I can run OS/2 on hardware (not all hardware) that has been released in 2024. It’s just that most of the world doesn’t know that OS/2 still exists and they want everything to be free. As if (I’m being sarcastic) they would do their life’s work and give it away for free. NOT!