netbeui maximum devices in a network?

Question

How many devices can be supported by NetBEUI protocol under windows 2000?

Answer 1

The number of devices is limited only by the number of characters available for use in the NetBIOS machine name -- 15 on Windows networks or 16 in pure NetBIOS networks. Although many non alpha-numeric characters are allowed, even if you restricted yourself to alpha-numeric characters you'd still be looking at 36 to the 15th power, one hell of a lot of devices.

As a practical matter, though, you'd never be able to deploy even a fraction of that number of devices on a pure NetBeui network since NetBeui depends upon broadcasts to locate devices on the network. The more devices on the network, the greater the broadcast traffic load and the poorer the network performance will be. On top of that, NetBeui is a non-routable protocol so all devices must be on the same network segment, further limiting how many you can deploy as a practical matter.

As a practical matter, anything more than a couple of hundred devices is going to extract enough of a performance penalty to render NetBeui impractical as a protocol for modern networks.

Answer 2

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