[comp.protocols.tcp-ip.ibmpc] Question on NETBIOS over TCP/IP

chris@inrs-telecom.uquebec.ca (Chris Toulson) (03/03/90)

   We currently have an application which we wrote that uses
NETBIOS calls to establish peer-to-peer communication between
2 (or more) PCs. Recently we have tried both FTP's PC/TCP and
Wollongongs WIN/TCP running their NETBIOS over TCP/IP packages
without success. I have a few questions and observations.

1. For simple NETBIOS applications, the packages seem to work
but our application is very often sending data in both directions
at the same time. For standard NETBIOS LANs, this works fine, but
over TCP/IP we get a connection closed message after just a 
few packets in each direction. (Sometimes everything just hangs...)
Is this a implementation problem or is it a more basic
restriction in TCP/IP protocols? Would it be better to access TCP/IP
directly, rather than using the NETBIOS interface?
If anyone is interested, I have a (fairly) simple test program
that starts up a NETBIOS session between two systems and then
each system starts sending files to the other node (simultaneously).

2. We are interested in converting our application to use TCP/IP
directly. Is there a standard interface, that provides reliable
flow-controlled transmission? How about an application developer's
toolkit? Would it have to be vendor specific?

Thanks.


Chris Toulson
Bell Northern Research
Montreal, Canada

chris@inrs-telecom.uquebec.ca