What useful work a netbios on an ethernet do

This is more about basic understanding NetBIOS. I read NetBIOSis an API and if I understand correctly NetBIOS can be used directly on an Ethernet network without TCP/IP or NetBEUI. What useful function ( if any) such a configuration accomplish.

Solution 1:

well, you have to consider when NetBIOS was groundbreaking. Back when Microsoft Implemented NetBIOS in 1985 for MS-DOS, IP wasn't entirely dominant in business networks. Even into the late-nineties, alternate network and inter-network layers like Novell IPX/SPX and IBM SNA (and a large number of other protocols) where competing in that space, so NetBIOS was implemented as a Session Layer protocol which could use many different network, inter-network, and transport protocol combinations. Early versions of NetBIOS were designed to work with non-ethernet networks like IBMs Token Ring protocols.

NetBIOS addressed LAN protocols using NetBIOS Frames, but in order to use Internetwork protocols, NetBIOS needed a special sever called a WINS server to resolve NetBIOS names on other, connected LANs.

Now-a-days NetBIOS runs over TCP/IP (NBT), and no longer needs concern itself with many other lower layer protocols, but that is the result of continual evolution over the course of decades.