Hi.


I've noticed that upon accessing a webpage on server A (my linux box), the server sends a netbios-ns packets to a server B. The web page retrieves information from an application running on server B.

The connection takes a while to complete, and it seems to be related to the netbios-ns packet being sent.

The details: I've set up tcpdump to sniff packet from server A to server B, and have found that when refreshing/access the web page, the connection seem to hang for maybe 5 seconds after sending a netbios-ns packet. So it seems as if server A sends out a netbios-ns packet, and then waits for an answer. I'm not sure if it actually gets an answer, or if things just time out.

So my question is this: I'm not very into what NetBIOS name service actually do, but it looks like an acient, pre-DNS tool. I know that netbios has something do with samba, but I can't understand how samba fits in this picture (i.e. why does a samba-related packet get sent when accessing a web page?).

Hope someone can help me clear this up.