On NetBIOS networks server number as set up with -server servernr command tails on the network manager and requester are translated into NetBIOS names internally. There is no equivalent of the various naming schemes available with TCP/IP. The network manager adds its name to the NetBIOS network, and requesters talk to this name. Therefore the -server servernr command tails must match everywhere.
You are recommended not to use NetBIOS for DP4 networking if at all possible. TCP/IP networking is our preferred network protocol. On Windows XP we only support TCP/IP protocol. NetBIOS protocol networking is only tested on Windows 95 and NT4, and not on any later versions of Windows.
There are special considerations when using our NetBIOS networking on Windows NT and 95:
On Windows NT the NetBIOS interface may be implemented over a variety of protocols. If you select properties for 'network neighbourhood', then select the 'Services' tab and double click on NetBIOS Interface you will usually see a variety of 'Lana numbers' and network routes. When loading NTBMGR.W32 or NTBW.W32 you should specify -lana n as a command tail to select the required route/protocol. If you are using a copy of NTBMGR.W32 dated prior to 23 September 1997 this command tail is not available, and you must change the lana numbers so that lana 0 is the one you want.
On Windows 95 the -lana command tail does not work (at least it did not for us). You have to use -lana 0 (the default). The protocol this uses will depend on the Properties of the network neighbourhood. If Windows 95 is using NETBEUI as its default protocol for NetBIOS it can talk to an NT server that has loaded NTBMGR on NetBIOS routed through Nbf. If you have selected TCP as the default protocol you can use NTBMGR via NetBT. We could not get a connection to NTBMGR via NetBIOS over IPX/SPX to work, but this may be a peculiarity of our network configuration.
If you can get NTBW.W32 to work with Win32 DP4 you will be able to load NTB2 in a DOS box and run DP4 MS-DOS software, though we do not officially support this.
If you do this you will find that DOS DP4 software runs very slowly unless you press a key, and this happens however you set the 'idle sensitivity' of the DOS box and whatever protocol you use beneath NetBIOS. The cause of this problem is that in order to avoid our code going into a 'busy loop' while waiting for a network command to complete we are calling an undocumented network idle interrupt each time we check for completion. It would appear that doing this has an extremely adverse effect on Windows 95. You should supply the -dosidle command tail to DOS DP4 network programs running in a DOS box. This forces the software to use the slightly less undocumented DOS idle interrupt instead (int 28h), and the performance is then very good.
This command tail is available on all MS-DOS networking components, and should be used if you are running MS-DOS networking components on any version of Windows, not just Windows 95.