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OS/2 TCPBEUI Name Resolution

73 pointsposted a month ago

22 Comments

blantonl

a month ago

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.

thedougd

a month ago

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

a month ago

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.

user

a month ago

[deleted]

kbmr

a month ago

how long were you doing that for? Did the grey beard finish his career at IBM?

pavlov

a month ago

> “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

a month ago

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

a month ago

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

a month ago

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.

wolrah

a month ago

> 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.

giamma

a month ago

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.

cduzz

a month ago

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

a month ago

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

a month ago

Which hypervisor(s) support OS/2?

giamma

a month ago

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

a month ago

Only VirtualBox that I know of. Innotek originally wrote it for that task.

blokey

a month ago

VMware ESXi does.

blantonl

a month ago

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

a month ago

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

a month ago

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

a month ago

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.

roydivision

a month ago

In a parallel universe OS/2 won over Windows, and we're living in a very different world.