smb clients and performance

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Tue, 7 Oct 1997, Darrin M. Gorski wrote:

> On Mon, 6 Oct 1997, Peter Blake wrote:
> 
> > A PC running WFWG 3.1x with the native networking enabled will broadcast,
> > when connected to an ethernet, whether there is a server within earshot or
> > not.
> 
> Because it's too stupid to do anything else. The DOS clients are really
> simple.
> 
> > It you install TCP/IP (from M$), then the SMB (aka CIFS?) protocol can be
> > carried by TCP and UDP frames. (Is this in addition to any raw mode,
> > anybody?).

no, there is no such thing as a "raw" mode (although i have had
discussions with someone about IBM's NetBEUI/NetBIOS documents.  i have
not examined these documents.  the differences between NetBIOS over
NETBEUI and NetBIOS over TCP/IP appear to be that the 4-byte SMB session
header is _not_ inserted in the NetBEUI stream, making it easy for people
to imagine that NETBIOS _is_ NETBEUI and to use these two words
interchangeably, particularly in this document). 


you have to have:

physical network               (ethernet; fddi; token ring)
network transport              (tcp/ip; netbeui; ipx/spx)
transport-independent protocol (NetBIOS)
NetBIOS services               (SMB; WinPopup; Browsing; IIS; MS-SQL; Netmon)

> > I have observed (with tcpdump) that M$ servers (and samba) will compete
> > for election at regular intervals of a second or so.
> 
> Browsing.
> 
> > If WINS is disabled in favour of DNS, does the name-related broadcasting
> > by an M$ client stop?

the only way to switch off the broadcasting is to disable browsing.  
disabling browsing on microsoft machines will also disable SMB services.

this is probably not what you want.


<a href="mailto:lkcl at switchboard.net"  > Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton </a>
<a href="http://mailhost.cb1.com/~lkcl"> Lynx2.7-friendly Home Page   </a>
<br><b>  "Apply the Laws of Nature to your environment before your
          environment applies the Laws of Nature to you"              </b>