.: Advanced Linux Networking :.

Few Linux computers participate in NetBEUI communications because the standard kernel lacks a NetBEUI stack. In 2000, Procom Technologies (http://www.procom.com) released an open source NetBEUI stack for Linux, as well as patches to Samba (described in Chapter 7, File and Printer Sharing via Samba), to allow Samba to operate over NetBEUI rather than TCP/IP. These patches have not become commonplace, and in fact they aren't posted directly on Procom's Web site, although you can request the stack from their technical support department. The NetBEUI stack may not work properly with kernels beyond the 2.0.x series (I was unable to get the patches to compile with a 2.2.18 kernel, for instance). The NetBEUI stack was also designed for versions of Samba before 2.0.7, although there's been some talk of adding the NetBEUI support to Samba sometime before Samba 3.0 is released. The support also requires recompiling both your kernel and Samba. For these reasons, you're probably better off foregoing the use of NetBEUI unless you have a very compelling reason to use it, such as a network on which TCP/IP is forbidden. If you really must use NetBEUI, you may need to use it with an older 2.0.x kernel and Samba 2.0.6 or earlier.

In addition to patching the Linux kernel and Samba, the NetBEUI stack comes with a number of tools that let you configure and manipulate it. This configuration tends to be fairly simple, and in most cases you'll use new Samba options to control the computer's NetBEUI behavior, but the separate utilities can be useful for troubleshooting and for learning more about NetBEUI. One utility in particular, netb, is also required to start up the NetBIOS stack, as described shortly.