NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hello,

I am a recent purchaser of NASLite v2. I had been evaluating both OpenFiler and Freenas. I decided on NASLite because of its reliablity and performance. However, I found that I had to enable NetBIOS on my xp workstations in order to use SMB. Further investigation via a nmap port scan revealed that NASLite is not listening on TCP Port 445. Both Openfiler and Freenas did support Direct hosting of SMB over TCP/IP (TCP Port 445).

I'd really like to keep NetBIOS disabled because of how chatty the protocol is on the network. If anyone has any suggestions or workarounds, I'd be interested to hear.

Thanks all,

The IT Dude

Thats strange, how is my MacOSX box talking to NASLite via SMB then? MacOSX doesn't have netbios.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106439

lists some useful info.

Sorry, I don't know anything about the MAC. But, according to that list, it looks like the MAC does use TCP 139 for talking to windows SMB. (Not sure if MAC actually uses the "NetBIOS" name or not)

Can you do a netstat command (or something similiar) in a MAC? If so, you could connect to a share on the NASLite and then run netstat to see what ports it is actually using to connect with.

If you know Unix, you've got a head start

Mac OS X is basically a Unix variant, with Apple's gui, thus netstat (along with all the other usual tools) works just fine.

Apart from a quick test with 2.04, I haven't used Naslite for several weeks, & won't get an opportunity to start it up again for a couple of weeks. During my quick test, the hd filled up, so I swapped it for a brand new 400G Samsung Spinpoint & to my amazement, returning to it several hours later, the log was jammed with hd write errors. The hd is fine, just NL isn't happy with it
I also bought a D-Link gigabit ethernet card which sped up my old G3 mac transfers from 500MB per min to 800
I popped it in the NL box, only to find it's not supported.......

Anyway, I've just run netstat for you, as there's 2 pc's on the LAN ATM, so here you go.
I imagine you'll find this helps a little?

Sorry I can't try NL directly, but I'm nowhere near it. If no other mac users can try, let me know & I'll try it in 2 weeks for you.

Last login: Fri Mar 23 15:40:34 on console
Welcome to Darwin!
G3:~ j$ netstat
Active Internet connections
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address (state)
tcp4 0 0 192.168.1.2.49270 imap.plus.net.imap ESTABLISHED
tcp4 0 0 192.168.1.2.netbios-ss 192.168.1.5.1069 ESTABLISHED
tcp4 0 0 192.168.1.2.49160 mail.messagingen.imaps ESTABLISHED
tcp4 0 0 192.168.1.2.49157 mail.messagingen.imaps ESTABLISHED
tcp4 0 0 192.168.1.2.49156 imap.plus.net.imap ESTABLISHED
tcp4 0 0 localhost.netinfo-loca localhost.1017 ESTABLISHED
tcp4 0 0 localhost.1017 localhost.netinfo-loca ESTABLISHED
tcp4 0 0 localhost.netinfo-loca localhost.1021 ESTABLISHED
tcp4 0 0 localhost.1021 localhost.netinfo-loca ESTABLISHED
udp4 0 0 localhost.49263 *.*
udp4 0 0 192.168.1.2.netbios-dg *.*
udp4 0 0 192.168.1.2.netbios-ns *.*
udp4 0 0 192.168.2.3.netbios-dg *.*
udp4 0 0 192.168.2.3.netbios-ns *.*
udp4 0 0 *.netbios-dgm *.*
udp4 0 0 *.* *.*
udp4 0 0 *.* *.*
udp4 0 0 *.svrloc *.*
udp4 0 0 *.* *.*
udp4 0 0 *.mdns *.*
udp4 0 0 *.mdns *.*
udp4 0 0 localhost.49159 localhost.1022
udp4 0 0 localhost.49158 localhost.1022
udp4 0 0 localhost.1022 *.*
udp4 0 0 192.168.1.2.49157 *.*
udp4 0 0 localhost.49156 localhost.1023
udp4 0 0 localhost.1023 *.*
udp4 0 0 192.168.1.2.ntp *.*
udp4 0 0 localhost.ntp *.*
udp4 0 0 *.ntp *.*
udp6 0 0 *.5353 *.*
udp4 0 0 *.mdns *.*
udp4 0 0 *.* *.*
udp4 0 0 localhost.netinfo-loca *.*
udp4 0 0 *.ipp *.*
udp4 0 0 *.netbios-ns *.*
icm6 0 0 *.* *.*
icm6 0 0 *.* *.*
Active LOCAL (UNIX) domain sockets
A

@ the.it.dude

Did you "enable" NetBIOS or did you install it?

It sounds like you're confusing NetBIOS with NetBEUI - that old, and yes, chatty, non routable local area network protocol that was popular in the early days of Windows.

NetBEUI is not installed on WindowsXP by default, and in fact most people don't know it is still available - so if you did not deliberately install it from the CD, then you don't actually have NetBEUI running on your network, but most likely NetBIOS over TCP/IP which is not the same thing.

For what it's worth - NetBIOS was developed by IBM and Microsoft's NetBEUI is a derivative of that (the acronym actually means NetBIOS Enhanced User Interface) and neither one of them uses port 139 - the concept of "sockets", which is a combination of the ip address and the port number, is pure tcp/ip, which came along many years later.

fordem,

Yep, I remember the old NetBEUI, Hated that too. (Very chatty, but it was efficient). Anyway....

I'm talking about the WINS Tab in the Advanced TCP/IP Settings under the NIC properties. There is a radio button at the bottom for Disabling NetBIOS over TCP/IP. This effectively turns off ports 137, 138, 139 (All the NetBIOS ports) and leaves only TCP 445 listening. This also forces the client to use TCP 445 for SMB connections. (You do lose WINS and the ability to "see" computers in network neighborhood when doing this, but it stops all the constant broadcasts) I expect Microsoft to eventually completely drop support for WINS and NetBIOS.

NetBIOS over tcp/ip is enabled by default on Windows XP, and I've never noticed a problem with broadcast traffic, so I pulled out my network analyzer and hooked it up - broadcast traffic was minimal, less than 1 packet/sec - and that was ALL broadcast traffic, not just NetBIOS/NetBEUI related broadcasts.

Seeing as the network was fairly quiet, I decided to crank things up a notch, and transferred a 2GB file across it a couple of times - using Windows explorer to make sure there was SMB traffic - and sure enough, the protocol distribution showed an enormous jump in NetBIOS related traffic, but the broadcast traffic remained below 1 packet/sec average, as compared to peak traffic in excess of 8,000 packets/sec during the file transfers.

My conclusion - constant broadcasts - caused by enabling NetBIOS over tcp/ip - do not represent a significant portion of my network traffic, and as such are not a problem.

I have the same issue with my Samsung drives when I enable SMART in the setup. Once I turned it off, the errors went away. It happened with all 3 brand new Samsung drives I am using.

fordem,

That's interesting. I'm a network engineer, and I've seen the negative effects of NetBIOS broadcast traffic in corporate environments (particularly over wireless). However, I've never actually tested it on my home network My guess is that it is also a very low percentage of the total traffic on my network.

I guess the biggest annoyance I have is that I have NetBIOS disabled on my laptop when I'm at work or traveling, but I have to remember to re-enable it when I'm at home.

Still, I know linux supports SMB without NetBIOS, so I wouldn't think it would be that difficult to enable it in NASLite. (Then again, what do I know about developing )

Thanks

the.it.dude

Perhaps you need to take a second look at the broadcast traffic and it's sources - is it really NetBIOS related?

fordem,

I'm not sure if your asking about my work related experiences or my home network...

As for home, I haven't yet done a packet capture to even see what kind of traffic was bouncing around.

For work related, yes I'm certain it is netbios. All broadcast packets to TCP 139 usually. This is common on Windows networks. Employing a WINS server and making sure all the computers register with WINS and use WINS for NetBIOS name resolution greatly reduces the broadcasts (but doesn't completely eliminate it). Since Microsoft introduced Active Directory, they have been slowly moving/pushing away from NetBIOS and WINS to DNS and Direct hosting of SMB over TCP/IP. (Unfortunately, many applications, including some MS apps, still depend on NetBIOS for proper functionality)

If naslite doesn't use tcp ip for smb, how come I can't get to my smb shares when I don't give naslite a ip address?

GPLWatcher,

I'm not sure I understand your question? TCP/IP IS a requirement for smb. SMB in a Microsoft world either uses NetBIOS (TCP/UDP Ports 137,138,139) or Direct Hosting (TCP 445) starting with Windows 2000. Either way, NASLite definitely needs an IP address assigned to it.

Hey all,

I'm sorry this thread has kind of splintered off into a discussion about protocols. Although, I am surprised nobody else has come across this same issue with NASLite.

I just wanted to post my request since I didn't find anything related in a search.

Thanks for everyone's time and responses,

IT Dude