VPNs and NetBIOS

Solution 1:

As ErikE has already mentioned, NetBIOS is a broadcast protocol, what this means in reality is that all of the machines on your local network shout there details to each other when they are on the local network so that all of the hosts know who there neighbours are and what services they can provide.

To be clear this is not an issue because you are attempting to access these devices over a VPN but because you are no longer on the same local network. Exactly the same symptoms would occur if you were to access them from an alternate local subnet.

Now the good news. NetBIOS as I mentioned is used for advertising Servers and Services, however you can go looking. This means you can use IP addresses to connect to those machines, or you can preload what's known as a lmhosts file on your machine which holds the name and ip address information for these machines locally on your machine.

You don't mention in your question what exactly you're trying to achieve but if you would take the question back a step and explain what you're trying to achieve I can probably offer up some options as to resolve your issue.

Solution 2:

NetBIOS is broadcast based.

The purpose of WINS is to fascilitate NetBIOS name resolution over broadcast domain boundaries.

A VPN router (or any router) is a broadcast domain boundary.

Yes, WINS is a necessity in a routed environment if NetBIOS is a requirement.

NetBIOS has been obsoleted by DNS for years however, as it scales poorly (broadcast based, flat namespace). Migrate away from NetBIOS if at all an option.