NETBIOS over VPN

[Repair-my-pc]

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 been requested before and has not happened, looking at the box, it does not advise anywhere that this is not possible and this is a basic requiement of the VPN.  As I have two of these units and bought twenty licenses for 3 years I feel somewhat cheated on this.

Can someone please investigate this?

[schumaku]

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.

[Repair-my-pc]

Believe it or not, I was told to make this request by Netgear. Just goes to show.

In addition the BR500 is not a consumer Router, its classed as business grade. Accessing file shares using the IP address causes problems for the newer versions of Office as it claims that these files have been downloaded from the internet.

A VPN should be able to do Point to Point without any issues, and work arounds should not have to be used.

My primary site has a windows Server 2019 Essentials set-up running full A/D.

The layout is such

Netgear 4G Modem --> Netgear BR500 Router -->Netgear 24 Port PoE Swith -> Clients and Server

As the netgear 4G Modem is set up as a modem and not DHCP, the routing is done by the BR500

Surely someone on the remote site or using the client VPN should be able to connect and map to a network drive and resources without trying to remember IP Addtresses.

If the BR500 is not capable of doing this, it should not be sold as a VPN.

Anyone wish to make another suggestion for a VPN Router with licenses?

[schumaku]

It's OK, could not see a reference to the BR500 and it's VPN above. The problems however are the same ... your server does certainly use WS-Discovery and by default certainly not NetBIOS (whoever brought up this idea).

Can't speak for Netgear's Instant VPN thingie or on how to make either WS-Discovery (mDNS based) and/or the remote DNS available over the Instant VPN. With a remote "internal" DNS entry made available (like server.int.yourdomain.com or server.yourdomain.local ) you would be able to reach the server using it's name at least - without the ability for the discovery over the Instant VPN.

Is there a discussion of this problem in the community here already?