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Using OmniClient with WindowsXP

As some of our readers have found out over the last few months when you upgrade a computer to WindowsXP Omniclient can suddenly stop working. This can be a rather worrying experience especially if you rely on having RISC OS machines networked to Windows machines. Users of LanMan98 from Warm Silence Software will not suffer from this problem. However if you are still using LanMan it is quite easy to solve the problem, in one of two ways.

NetBEUI

LanMan normally using a protocol called NetBEUI (NetBIOS Extended User Interface), this originated in the mid 1980s and for some reason MicroSoft have decided that they no longer wish to support this protocol. When you upgrade from an existing version of Windows you will be warned that NetBEUI is not compatible with WindowsXP. If you buy a new computer with XP you will find that the NetBEUI protocol is not installed. However NetBEUI is still supplied on the WindowsXP CD and can be easily installed with no problems by a competent user in a few minutes using the guide below. Before doing this you will need to ensure that you can see "hidden" files and folders by doing the following:

Click Start, then Run, type Explorer, and then press ENTER. Click Tools, click Folder Options and then click the View tab. Under Advanced Settings, click Show hidden files and folders under the Hidden files and folders Folder. You are now ready to install NetBEUI.

Installing NETBEUI on WindowsXP

  • Insert your Windows XP CD-ROM into the CD-ROM drive and go into the Valueadd\MSFT\Net\NetBEUI directory.
  • Copy Nbf.sys to the C:\Windows\System32\Drivers directory.
  • Copy Netnbf.inf to the C:\Windows\Inf hidden directory.
  • Click Start, click Control Panel and then double-click Network Connections.
  • Right-click the adapter you want to add NetBEUI to, and then click Properties.
  • On the General tab, click Install.
  • Click Protocol and then click Add.
  • Click to select NetBEUI Protocol from the list and then click OK.
  • Restart your computer if you receive a prompt to complete the installation.

The NetBEUI protocol should now be installed and working and hopefully OmniClient and LanMan will now also be working.

TCP/IP

If you don't fancy using the above technique you can also solve the problem by altering the OmniClient configuration using the !OmniSetup program as shown below.

As you can see currently LanManager is using NetBEUI, you can easily change this to TCP/IP by clicking on the TCP/IP button and then clicking on save.

OmniClient will now be configured to use the TCP/IP protocol rather than NetBEUI.

Conclusion

As you can see there are two ways of getting round the problem of using OmniClient and WindowsXP together. Altering the settings inside OmniClient using OmniSetup is by far the easiest and quickest provided you only have one or two machines to alter. However if you have a large network of RISC OS machines, all connected to an XP based server then installing NetBEUI on that server will be much quicker than having to alter the setup of each of the RISC OS machines.

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