Re: NFS MOUNT blues

If they don't have to be in the same subnet, I'm happy to know that. I was merely saying that Gad should not be restricted to think that the IBM i cannot use smb, when that is what QNTC uses.

*Regards*

*Vern Hamberg*

IBM Champion 2025 <cid:part1.fQdbRHwD.0Jd0uss6@centurylink.net> CAAC (COMMON Americas Advisory Council) IBM Influencer 2023

On 4/4/2025 10:13 AM, Patrik Schindler wrote:

Hello Vern,

Am 04.04.2025 um 16:11 schrieb Vern Hamberg via MIDRANGE-L<midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

if the IBM i and the Windows machines are in the same network subnet, you can use either NFS or Windows Networking, which uses Samba

This is completely unrelated to "being in the same subnet". Unless there's some firewall in between, IP communication is transparent to the application using it. (There are always exceptions, e. g. when higher layers of a badly designed protocol make assumptions about the behavior of lower layers.)

This "same subnet" thinking might stem from LANs infancy times in the 1980's, when IBMs LAN-Manager was state of the art. This was later (late 1980s) replaced by Microsofts LAN-Manager dialect, running on DOS based Windows releases. It used NBF (NetBIOS Frames, often wrongly called NetBEUI) exclusively. No IP. Anyone remembering "trumpet winsock"?

NBF is inherently "directly Ethernet", just like SNA over 802.2 DLC, and cannot be routed as we understand routing today. Those protocols can be bridged, though, but that largely counters modern concepts of network segmentation for security purposes.

With the release of Windows NT in mid 1993, Microsoft added NBI (NetBIOS over IPX), and NBT (NetBIOS over TCP, running over Port 139). The former died out when Novell was pushed out of the market by Microsoft Windows NT. The latter has been replaced by CIFS — again somewhat later —, running on TCP port 445, removing NetBIOS altogether, and with it those strange error messages about "server not found" when using IP addresses to connect to a service.

Sorry for the long post, but I was often swallowing an answer when people state things have to be in the same subnet, or even on the same switch — also no guarantee, because switches can have different ports being assigned to different VLans for decades. This is not meant personal against you, Vern!

:wq! PoC