Netbios and Windows 7

From communication with Frank Rupp

Networking between Warp and Windows Seven definitely works, still without recourse to a domain controller, though it took me a while to get the routine down. I'll set the stuff up like :

[A] Netbios names none longer than eight characters, no spaces, no underscores, no hyphens. Also, a capital letter at the beginning and seven numbers after that, - as, 'F5551212' - as this will avoid the inconsistencies which are known to exist between how different versions of Windows resolve the case of characters which come after the first character.

[A2] About the passwords : yes if they have letters, then those must be capitals only, - and - if netbios, or netbios over TCP/IP, is part of the setup, then the password ought to be no longer than twelve characters. If it's longer, the TCP/IP part will still work, but the netbios layer will throw this error message :

"UPM0004C: The program failed to start. The exit code returned from the program is:19"

Those two limitations - capital letters only, and no longer than twelve characters, - actually do leave the Warp netbios interface being a bit behind the curve for security, in comparison with other network stacks.

[B] A user profile, in order to be seen & connected by a Windows Seven machine, cannot be a profile with no password.

[C] A user profile, in order to be seen & connected by an OS/2 machine : if there is a password, that password cannot contain lower-case letters.

[D] Machines to be connected by way of MPTS need to be all on the same Netbios 'workgroup' name. It also helps if the profile names are the same, and the passwords are the same. Connecting by way of Samba for eComStation, simultaneously to differently named workgroups, I'll suspect 'probably' works, though I've not yet tried it. And Windows from 95 onwards seem never to have had a problem discerning the existence of multiple workgroup names, - though a Windows 95 machine seems unable to present a password which Windows Seven will recognize.

[E] Connecting dissimilar machines by way of wireless networking, as in a cafe, works equally well with either MPTS or Samba. But, it needs to be wireless with no password. I've no doubt that there is, or ought to be, a workaround for this, - - ?

[F] Sharing works better on Windows Seven if there is at least one shared partition which is either FAT16 or FAT32. A detachable floppy disk would probably do it. Thus do I gleefully crudely shortcircuit the excessive & annoying requirements of late-type Windows networking. And such a partition once fitted, also makes the NTFS partitions more easily visible.

[G] I've found that with a Windows Seven machine and a Warp machine connected wirelessly, an NTFS partition is more easily accessible to OS/2 than are the FAT 16 or FAT32 partitions. Files can be more easily copied & moved back and forth, including all the long file & directory names, extended attributes, and so forth.

[H] The windows Seven copy and move routines - what the hell happened to them ?? They are now weeny & useless, and choke hopelessly when you try to copy or move a directory, or to copy or move more than three files at once. Not so our trusty Workplace Shell - - if you've got a batch of stuff you want to manipulate between two Windows Seven machines, connect them both to an OS/2 machine, and have at !