Re: GMC Network

[Bobo Rajec <bobo bspc sk>]

[OFFTOPIC]

Thus spake Jorge Gomes Silva:

> Brandon S. Allbery [SMTP:allbery@hilfy.ece.cmu.edu] wrote:
> > that a bunch of Windows boxes spamming the network every 30 seconds isn't 
> > noticed.
> You are wrong. That is true if you are running your Windows network over 
> NetBEUI. However if the network runs over TCP/IP (and this is what "large 
> companies" usually have) you can use WINS. 

He is right, unfortunately. You seem to be confusing announcement
broadcasts, aka browsing broadcasts, and name resolution traffic,
which could be either broadcasts or unicasts to the WINS server.

What you see in the Network Neighbourhood (NN) window is the result of
the browsing broadcasts. All windows machines produce these, unless
you specifically disabled it ("browser service") on the NT servers and
on all Windows machines.

I do not want to go into details like browser selections, master
browser, domain master browser and so on, it's all really crap.

You use WINS server when you want to connect to the specified NetBIOS
name. You could obtain this name from the NN window or you could type
it in manually (net use x: \\server\share). This is the case when the
windows machine asks the WINS server about the IP address of the
specified NetBIOS name.

That's why it happens so often that you see machines in the NN window
that really aren't on the network anymore ("Specified name could not
be found"), or you don't see nodes there when you are positively sure
they are there, up and running.

BTW: I've been on a large network with many servers and many pcs
coming up and down all day long where the browsing traffic accounted
for more than 60% of the broadcasts. It's *highly* recommended to
disable the service and leave it running on at most 5-10
machines. (bug: you cannot disable it in Wfw 3.11. Life is hard)

	bobo rajec