[HN Gopher] OS/2 TCPBEUI Name Resolution
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OS/2 TCPBEUI Name Resolution
Author : kencausey
Score : 66 points
Date : 2024-10-10 05:46 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.os2museum.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.os2museum.com)
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "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."_
|
| I wonder if there is literally anyone else in the world who has
| this problem in 2024.
|
| Jokes aside, I appreciate the detailed work that OS/2 Museum
| does. From a developer's point of view it often feels like
| everything is a Unix nowadays, so it's easy to forget that the PC
| revolution's mainstream came from very different commercial
| origins and gradually blended with the more "academic" tech like
| TCP/IP.
| amaccuish wrote:
| OS/2 Museum is one of the few sites that can feed my weird
| fascination with Netware and the old NT domain stuff, it's
| great for getting an insight like you said in to the pre TCP/IP
| world.
| giamma wrote:
| Well, ArcaNoae is still under development [1] and community
| events are still being organized [2]
|
| [1] https://www.arcanoae.com/roadmaps/arcaos/ [2]
| https://www.arcanoae.com/blog/
| stuaxo wrote:
| Wish they had a community version I could play with, but
| understand they would be worried about cannibalising their
| already small market.
|
| Still, for something that I have only really used in one job
| for a year, I'm not going to try it out further without some
| sort of try-before-you-buy, even if it might be interesting.
| giamma wrote:
| I think they are not really interested in individual users,
| they aim at corporations having legacy applications that
| run on OS/2 only, so the goal is to make the system
| virtualization friendly and runnable on more recent
| hardware.
|
| That said, my understanding (as a former OS/2 user 3
| decades ago), is that a community edition cannot exist
| because IBM and MS still hold the copyright and
| intellectual property and the software cannot be
| distributed for free.
| wolrah wrote:
| > Wish they had a community version I could play with, but
| understand they would be worried about cannibalising their
| already small market.
|
| They may not have a choice either. IBM still owns OS/2.
| ArcaOS, like eComStation before it, is a licensed
| distribution. Their FAQ entry on refunds indicates that
| they have to pay IBM for their part of every license and
| that portion is both nonrefundable and nontransferable so
| if they refund a license they've lost that amount. It also
| presumably sets a lower bound on how little they could
| charge without actually losing money on every copy
| distributed. It would not actually surprise me to find out
| that their "personal edition" license is as cheap as they
| can consider "worth it" to offer.
|
| IBM clearly stopped caring about growing the OS/2 market
| decades ago and I don't think Arca Noae really has any
| ambition to either. It's not like there's any realistic
| scenario where it suddenly becomes appealing as a target
| platform for anyone not already heavily invested in it
| outside of occasional hobbyists. The lack of any concept of
| users and privilege levels makes it undesirable for most
| desktop and server use cases that don't basically come down
| to "appliance" and as an appliance it's hard to see what
| OS/2 via ArcaOS on modern x86 offers over more popular
| platforms, especially with the 32 bit 4GB ceiling forever
| overhead. Changing those things would require substantial
| compatibility breaks which is not really viable when your
| core business is supporting environments that don't want to
| change their software.
| cduzz wrote:
| I recently (well, 2 years ago now? Recent relative to os/2
| I guess) installed warp on an omnibook 800ct. You can get
| the warp disks off of the os2 museum...
|
| Actually, I installed it onto a virtualbox guest of an old
| mac that was using an old compact flash card on a usb ->
| ide adapter, and then I moved that to the computer...
|
| Anyhow, it all "worked" ; I even got some old games working
| on it. Blast from the past...
| systems_glitch wrote:
| Probably. I run all the old, insecure machines on their own
| subnet and physical segment, and some of the "keep them going"
| services are hosted on VMs running on our modern VM hosts.
| We've got a few things that have to cross the router/firewall
| between the two networks, not SMB currently though.
| transpute wrote:
| Which hypervisor(s) support OS/2?
| blokey wrote:
| VMware ESXi does.
| giamma wrote:
| Based on documentation, ArcaNoae comes with support for
| large hard drives, newer video chips, USB etc etc.. I guess
| it should run on most hypervisor(s) or virtualization
| systems, provided you use a humble hardware configuration
| (e.g. no need to use GBs or RAM) even VirtualBox or KVM
| most likely will work. But whether it's supported by the
| hypervisor vendor or not is a different story.
|
| Plain OS/2 did not receive any update for 20+ years, it's
| installer won't work on modern hardware/virtualization
| systems.
| lproven wrote:
| Only VirtualBox that I know of. Innotek originally wrote it
| for that task.
| blantonl wrote:
| I remember we thought it was straight up wizardry when we could
| get two OS/2 Lan Server servers to communicate over a _network
| that we didn 't control_ via Netbios over TCP/IP. It was like
| the dawn of a new age!
| GeekyBear wrote:
| I had a buddy who worked in customer service for an earlY
| ISP, and his co-workers were shocked that he could print to
| the Windows NT print server at work from the dial up internet
| connection he used at home.
|
| Broadcast name resolution couldn't work over his dial up
| internet connection, but you could still manually set up an
| LMHosts file on his home Win95 box.
| ay wrote:
| A tangentially related networking trivia that probably won't be
| useful to anyone here:
|
| NetBEUI (the original MS networking, running directly over
| Ethernet rather than TCP/IP), was using LLC-2 Ethernet frames,
| and as such it was a great way to test DLSw (data link switching)
| in a very simple lab (two windows 95 machines, separated by two
| routers, connected via IP link).
|
| Why was that ever a thing? Because of
|
| https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos-basic-skills?topic=llc2-how-...
|
| And most of IBM networking used Token Ring rather than Ethernet,
| which was harder to get hold of and more expensive.
| nyrikki wrote:
| A bit of additional information.
|
| NetBEUI, which was originally part of a unified NETBIOS, before
| the latter became what remained after the API separated out due
| to the rise of routed networks was an IBM invention.
|
| NetBEUI wasn't dependant on Ethernet, and in the late 80s
| ARCNET was quite popular because it was cheaper and more
| reliable than coax based Ethernet, especially with thinnet T
| adapters.
|
| Tokenring is closer IBMs response to the DIX consortium getting
| the ISO to adopt Ethernet as a standard, trying to maintain the
| domonice they had with SNA.
|
| By the time windows 95 was released, inexpensive twisted pair
| Ethernet was quite popular. But when that physical layer market
| was developing LAN segment communications were the main
| drivers.
|
| Novell releasing low cost ne2000 cards had a lot to do with
| Ethernet winning out in systems that were small enough to not
| be forced into proprietary solutions.
| blantonl wrote:
| This really brings back some memories. My first career in IT was
| supporting and implementing an OS/2 Lan Server based banking
| implementation for a regional bank in the south. The bank
| deployed what was essentially a massive flat token ring based
| network interconnected via Fiber to regional areas and leased
| lines to branches. It was not Netbios over TCP/IP, it was
| straight up Netbios over the entire network. Given Netbios is
| broadcast based for resolution, broadcast storms were common
| across the network, so a gordian knot of filters and configs were
| setup at the routers to mitigate this. There was no concept of
| subnet based routing implemented yet.
|
| I ended up taking a job with IBM supporting the TCP/IP stack on
| top of OS/2. It was a 24 year old me, and a grey beard 60 year
| old dude that literally supported the entire OS/2 Lan Server
| TCP/IP stack across the world during the time that corporate
| networks were just beginning to connect to the Internet. Everyone
| else on the OS/2 support team at IBM just punted to us anything
| that was TCP/IP related and thought we were wizards or something.
| What a wild time to be alive.
| kbmr wrote:
| how long were you doing that for? Did the grey beard finish his
| career at IBM?
| thedougd wrote:
| Cool! I have fond memories of installing the TCPIP stack on top
| of Warp with a six(?) disk set.
|
| As a teenager I had a PS/2 with a token ring card and an
| additional serial ports card. OS/2 let us run a PPP server for
| Winsock clients. We used it for Quake and other lan games.
| zabzonk wrote:
| I remember installing a horribly expensive Ethernet card on
| an Altos SCO Xenix box, which required recompiling the kernel
| to install the drivers (on 5 inch floppies). I was convinced
| this would never work, but magically it did! Things were a
| lot tougher back in those days.
|
| Oh, and Token Ring, where you could almost see the token
| crawling around the ring, like an arthritic snail.
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(page generated 2024-10-10 23:01 UTC)