On 28 Mar 2002, at 10:22, Sergio Nemirovsky wrote:

> The easy way is to use NETBEUI protocol  instead of TCP/IP....
>
> You don't have to configure anything, except the WORKGROUP name.
> This name MUST match in both PC's.
>
> You can add this protocol under the Network properties.

  Several people have suggested NetBEUI as a solution.  *I* would not
recommend it *in most cases* (I'll be more specific further down),
though, for four reasons:

1.  It does everything by sending broadcasts, and relying on the
receiving CPUs to figure out what messages are for them.  This means
that it makes fairly efficient use of network bandwidth (which is
pretty cheap and rarely saturated on a home network anyway) by using
up CPU horsepower (which there never seems to be enough of, at least
for "power users".)

2.  Since it does everything by sending broadcasts, it gets no
advantage from using a switch instead of a hub.  It's true that
switch prices have come down considerably in the last couple of
years, but still -- running broadcast traffic through a switch should
be the exception, not the rule.

3.  The issue with Network Neighborhood and file sharing is at the
NetBIOS level, which runs on top of TCP/IP or NetBEUI (or IPX, for
that matter).  If you leave NetBIOS bound to multiple protocols, it
will try them in turn until one works.  But if the one it tries first
always fails, it will "work, but be really slow for some reason".

4.  Because NetBIOS and WinSock can work over multiple protocols,
things which use these can "appear to work" in a multi-protocol
environment, only to fail mysteriously -- or have other things NOT
work because they require TCP/IP, and there's still some problem
there.

  Items 3 and 4 explain why adding NetBEUI may "appear to work" as a
short-term band-aid approach, but unless you will never connect your
LAN to the Internet (and I know that this is true for some cases,
such as where you just need to quickly transfer some files between
two machines), I believe that getting TCP/IP working correctly is a
better approach in the long run, AND that diagnosing TCP/IP issues
will be made harder if NetBEUI is also running.

  That said, Microsoft seems to have made getting Network
Neighborhood to work in a 95/98/ME-only TCP/IP LAN unnecessarily hard
by hiding too many of the details.  I think this was a defensible
choice in 1995-8 when few home LANs existed and most corporate LANs
had at least a few NT boxes on them, but here in 2002 we seem to be
seeing a lot of home users trying to hook two or three 98/ME machines
together, and a design choice made "in the last century" makes it
hard to troubleshoot this scenario.

Dave Gillett

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