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Broadcasts enable TCP/IP to send certain types of messages, such as alerts, to a wide audience on a directly attached LAN. NetBIOS can use the broadcast mechanism for tasks such as name registration. The following steps will help ensure that broadcasting is working correctly, with the assumption that TCP/IP and NetBIOS are running on both the local and remote machines. It should be possible to run the local form of the nbtstat(1Mtcp) command on the local client machine, and also on the remote machine if the nbtstat command is available on that machine. The nbtstat command with no arguments should return NetBIOS status information if NetBIOS is running on the local machine.
net0: flags=23<UP,BROADCAST,NOTRAILERS> mtu 1500 inet 172.16.118.1 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 172.16.118.255 lo0: flags=49<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING> mtu 2048 inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff000000The network portion of the address in the preceding example is 172.16.118, and the host portion is set to all ``1''s by appending 255 (0xff) to the network portion. If you modify the broadcast address, you must shutdown and reboot so that the changes can take effect.
net0: flags=23<UP,BROADCAST,NOTRAILERS> mtu 1500 inet 172.16.118.1 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 172.16.255.255 lo0: flags=49<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING> mtu 2048 inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff000000If you change the broadcast address, shutdown and reboot to make sure the changes take effect.
Provided that NetBIOS is running on your system, statistics are displayed. If NetBIOS is not running, an error message is displayed instead.
To verify that NetBIOS can communicate with a remote system, use the
following form of the nbtstat command:
nbtstat -a remote_system_name
If NetBIOS can communicate between two systems, statistics about the remote system are displayed. If an error is returned, this indicates that NetBIOS is not working. This may be because there is still a TCP/IP broadcast incompatibility, or because different NetBIOS scope identifiers are being used.