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user145837
Asked: 2013-05-02 14:39:06 +0800 CST

how to get netbios or wins traffic across multiple network hops

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This network:

I have a samba server in the main office LAN.

I have multiple satellite offices, 3 hops away. Wins and netbios work fine, using both windows servers and samba servers. Such as:

[ main ] -- [office a]
[office]
[ lan  ]  -- [office b]

I tried to move one office to be one hop PAST another office. Such as:

[main office lan] -- [office a] -- [office b]

... and the routing, pinging, and porning all work great.

But the machines in office B can't SMB connect to any machines in the main LAN.

As far as I can tell, it is because netbios isn't making it between main and B.

net view ip.of.samba.server gives "cannot find path".

nbtstat -A ip.of.samba.server shows nothing.

The routers are Procurve 2800-series Layer 3 switches with ip routing enabled.

Do I need to enable udp broadcast forwarding? 

   ip routing
   ip udp-bcast-forward

....

  ip forward-protocol udp .....255 netbios-ns
  ip forward-protocol udp .....255 netbios-dgm

if so, which way? Do I need to enable that on each routing switch along the way? for every vlan? and what about TCP?

Hopefully someone here has run into this before.

picture of the network

I am trying to get rid of VLAN 20, send all the traffic for Office B thru 19 then 18. This all works for normal pinging, surfing, etc. so the routes are good.

networking

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    NetBIOS broadcasts are used in name resolution and mailslot communcations (primarily). The nbtstat -A ip-address command you reference, and net view \\ip-address use plain old unicast TCP to communicate, since no name resolution is involved. You don't need to do anything with NetBIOS broadcasts.

    If it were me, I'd sniff the traffic at a test client and at the server and see if all the traffic is getting through. I get a sneaking suspicion that you've got some traffic filtering somewhere that you don't realize.

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