NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
This item is sold as a complete and easy VPN, however it is somewhat misleading as the Netgear Insight VPN does not do NETBIOS over VPN. This needs to be impletmented ASAP This has apparently...
NetBIOS over VPN? At least one decade to late I'm afraid...
Let's break it down quickly:
- NetBIOS transport over TCP protocol is history, SMB protocol stack is the standard for hmmmm a long time.
- NetBIOS discovery and name resolution: This is IP broadcast based and would create a lot of noise over low bandwidth links - this would make it possible that (again old) devices would become visible in the Network Neighborhood e.g. on the Windows Explorer or MacOS Finder. Pure legacy however.
Nowadays in very small environments (where we have no decent Windows Server doing DNS - forwarding remote DNS is part of the OpenVPN config AFAIK) make use of WS-Discovery (WSD). This is however Multicast driven and again not intended to leave the non-router flat [V]LAN. Today one would use...
- DNS (requires infrastructure on the remote LAN) or mDNS (WSD). WSD can't leave the LAN as mentioned before, with the help of AVAHI (an mDNS implementation on Linux as the Netgear routers are) it would be possible to enable a forwarder. However, AVAHI is very "fat" in code size and memory requirements and might be not in place on any or all Netgear routers.
- Transport is something in the range of SMB 1.0 to SMB 3.2 (plain TCP nowadays).
Using \\[remote-LAN-IP] does allow accessing and browsing remote SMB services (Windows, MacOS, Linux, ...).
Now you might be able what you are really missing... Be awae that the Netgear consumer router division is pretty much deaf - sigh.