Netbios over IP

[maryodriscoll]

Hiya,Some customers would like to map network drives from one branch to another so I need to forward Netbios over IP. I would prefer not to enable bridging on every IP interface it hops across so would DLSW work?

[Jon Marshall]

Hi Mary

Not sure why you need to enable bridging. Netbios on it's own is non-routable but netbios over IP is routed so it should work fine.

Have i misunderstood ?

[maryodriscoll]

Jon

They want to map drives from 2 different IP subnets. I understood that Routers do not forward broadcast so I had to enable ip forward-protocol UDP 137, 138. I than checked cisco website and found the URL below which also suggesting enabling forward-protocol spanning-tree on all IP interfaces that this netbios packet would have to traverse? Is this incorrect?

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk870/tk877/tk880/technologies_tech_note09186a008011b570.shtml

[Harold Ritter · Accepted solution]

You don't need to forward broadcasted NetBIOS over TCP/IP messages from one subnet to the other if you use WINS.

For more information, please refer to the following Microsoft documents:

Domain Browsing with TCP/IP and LMHOSTS Files

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q150800/

and also

NetBIOS over TCP/IP Name Resolution and WINS

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/119493/EN-US/

Hope this helps,