NetBEUI as main protocol

[Christopher R. Hertel]

On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 10:20:38PM -0600, Jim Morris wrote:
:
> I am not telling you someone out there has not developed a NETBEUI 
> protocol stack that will run on Linux (I am assuming you are running 
> Linux).  But as a long time network administrator and programmer 
> myself, I cannot imagine WHY anyone would waste time doing so at this 
> point in time. Doing so would only have made sense quite a few years 
> ago (early to mid 1990's!)....

The reason for doing so is specifically because the NetBEUI transport is
non-routable.  It is much more difficult to remotely attack a fileserver
if you can't send a packet to it.  I work at a large University, and I
know of more than one small department that runs NetBEUI just to isolate 
their filesharing from the rest of the world.

> Samba itself is not really where the NETBEUI protocol would have to be 
> implemented...  someone jump in and tell me if I am mistaken....

Mostly correct.  Samba internally implements the NBT layer, which is a
mapping of the NetBIOS API to TCP/UDP/IP.  NetBEUI maps the NetBIOS API to
its own protocol (which is very close to the NetBIOS format).

To make NetBEUI work on a Linux box, you would need to implement the 
NetBEUI layer.  That's not too hard, but the next step would be to get 
smbclient (assuming you want client capabilities) to talk to the interface 
to NetBEUI.  Currently, all of Samba talks directly to TCP/UDP/IP.

Chris -)-----

-- 
Samba Team -- http://www.samba.org/     -)-----   Christopher R. Hertel
jCIFS Team -- http://jcifs.samba.org/   -)-----   ubiqx development, uninq.
ubiqx Team -- http://www.ubiqx.org/     -)-----   crh at ubiqx.mn.org
OnLineBook -- http://ubiqx.org/cifs/    -)-----   crh at ubiqx.org