As a consultant and trainer, I often get asked lots of technical questions. If you frequent the various newsgroups I contribute to, then you know I answer a lot of questions. For those who read my stuff, I hope you've found it interesting. I seem to get asked the same questions time and time again. While I enjoy helping people, it can get somewhat tedious answering what I see as the same old questions time after time.
So, for those answers I feel are obvious (at least to me), I've created some details covering the the main questions I can answer (and have entered onto these pages). These are intended to be my more definitive answers and (hopefully!) are free of typos and errors. I hope these are accurate and timely.
If there's anything you disagree with or want more detail on, then why not mail me??
Out of the box, Windows 95 does not do IP routing and this seems to be a problem for a lot of users, since they want to deploy Windows 95 as an IP router. During the betas, Win95 did do IP routing, but this was taken out at the final release. From what I've been told, there were bugs in the routing code and that's the reason it was removed. Of course, the marketing positioning of 95 must surely be an important issue as well.
You can get a patch for Win95 from Microsoft which will add IP routing functionality back in.. However, this patch is not released generally. The patch, a revised version of VIPX.386, is a QFE patch which works but only available to users who are having specific problems. Try looking in ftp.microsoft.com/softlib/MSLFILES/vipupd.exe for this patch. Use at your own risk!
I think that Windows 95 does not make a good choice as a router, certainly for any high volume networking situation. You're probably better off using Windows NT, or a real router. NT does do IP routing, although out of the box, NT 3.51 only implements static routing. The MultiProtocol Router product, available with NT 3.51 SP4, adds RIP routing. NT4 offers RIP routing as standard.
If you do want to use Windows 95 as a router, there are several other products that implement IP routing or act as a firewall/proxy. If you use any of these and have an opinion, or know of any products I've missed, please let me know.
I see a lot of confusion between NetBeui and NetBios. The differences are simple, but possibly misleading. In NT (and Win9x) terms, NetBeui is a transport protocol, at the same level in the network stack as TCP/IP and IPX/SPX. It is a simpler transport protocol than TCP/IP in that it does not support routing and is self configuring. NetBios, on the other hand, is a network interface and sits above the transport protocols.
A major weakness of NetBios is it's naming. With NetBios, the name space is flat, thus all systems and domains have to have a unique name, unlike DNS names which, being hierarchal, allows substaintially more flexibility.All NT, 95 and Windows for Workgroups systems have unique NetBios names. NT also used NetBios names to find different services by utilising the 16th character (often shown as NetBios name<xx> - the xx is the 16th character and is in hex). To find the domain controler for the Hawaii domain, for example, you would find HAWAII<1B>.
A programmer would use NetBios to access the transport protocols. In this sense, NetBios is transport independent. NetBios over TCP/IP (NBT) is defined in RFC 1001/2. With NT, if you have TCP/IP you have NetBios too, there's no way to separate this.
A final note: to a large degree, NetBios as both a network interface and a naming convention will be going in Windows 2000. Although Windows 2000 will support NetBios names (for downlevel clients and domains), DNS as the locator service and DNS names as standard. This will make many of us very pleased!
There are four places you can go, depending on who you are and how you have obtained the beta:
Windows 2000 has not been formally relased yet. It is currently in beta test. The Technical Beta programme is closed and is not accepting additional requests for membership (although from time to time a few new technical testers are added). The latest release issued is Build 1954, also known as RC0. This is NOT Beta 3, despite the art work!
In general The Windows NT 2000 beta is not generally available at present. If you want this beta, there are five approaches you can consider taking:-
