cannot see systems in network.

[Peter Samuelson]

[Eric Windisch <ewindisc at fit.edu>]
> I am at Uni and cannot see the majority of the users on the network..
> someone told me this may be because of NetBeui.

NetBEUI is a very simple transport-level protocol, almost NetBIOS over
raw ethernet.  It's good for plug-n-play instand Windows networking
where the admin doesn't have to set up TCP/IP infrastructure including
annoying things like routing.  (Because NetBEUI has *no* routing.)
It's also rather network-unfriendly in that it generates a lot of
mandatory broadcast traffic unlike using TCP/IP where you at least have
the option of using WINS.

Samba has no support for NetBEUI (yet -- there were rumors that Jeremy
Allison received a patch from someone to add such support), so if the
Windows clients converse using that, Samba is left out.  This is a more
general problem with having multiple protocols on your network -- not
everyone will see the whole conversation and the browse lists ("seeing"
users on the network, as you put it) will be unpredictable.

On your Windows clients (if you have any control over them) it is
almost always a good idea to uninstall NetBEUI and use only TCP/IP for
windows networking.  This used to come at a cost because not everyone
wanted the complexity of setting up TCP/IP, but these days almost
everyone has already done so because they want the use of a web
browser, so it's usually a sunk cost.

As for the other popular Windows networking transport, IPX/SPX, you can
leave it on the machine if it's being used for other things (networked
Diablo, for instance), but disable the bindings between IPX/SPX and the
"workstation" and "server" services.

Peter