First install the network components NetBEUI, Client for Microsoft Networks and File and printer sharing for Microsoft Networks using the network control panel. If they are not installed, use the Add button and find them under the Microsoft sections for Protocols, Clients, and Services respectively. During the installation, you may be prompted for the operating system disks and have to reboot the computer.
Just as a short note, the MacOS operating system is automatically pre-configured to "do the right thing" in most cases. There is really no analog for these steps on a MacOS system :).
To share the printer, go into Settings | Printers, then right-click on the desired printer and bring up the Sharing dialog. Within the sharing dialog, you give the printer a share name (usually the default is sufficient) and optionally give the printer a password. In a home network situation, it is pretty safe to share printers without using a password.
Browse the Network Neighborhood. If you see the name of the server computer, then you are in great shape. Otherwise, take a look at the tips and tricks section for some more sophisticated diagnostics and approaches.
Click on the name of the computer. You should be shown all of the shares - the icon will tell you if the share is a printer or a file system.
There is great convenience to being able to access any file on the home network from any other computer. Especially if you are running around doing "technical support" or helping someone with their homework, needing a file that is two floors away.
Again, the steps to share and mount a drive are very simple. First we start on the computer which will be sharing out the actual drive or directory. Assuming that you already have the proper file sharing software installed and configured as described above, you simply navigate to the drive that you want to share, right click on the drive or directory and select the Sharing option. Much like the printer, you give the share a name (again the default is usually fine) and a password. With file sharing, you should always use a password. Generally you will want to choose the Full option to allow Read/Write unless you have a specific unique situation. You will be prompted for the password a second time to verify the password.
It is actually not necessary to do anything special on the system which is going to read the data from the share. You simply navigate down through the Network Neighborhood, through the computer and down to the drive. The first time you enter a share you will need to know the password. But from that point forward until you reboot, your computer will remember the password.
You can navigate the network drive just like a normal drive. You can open and save files from the shared drive as if it were local. You may need to develop the skill of jumping to the Network Neighborhood in the Save or Open dialogs, but it does not take long before it is second nature.
In some situations, you might want to "mount" a network drive and give it a permanent letter. Some software prefers to deal with a drive letter as compared to navigating down through the network neighborhood. This is accomplished by navigating to the drive through network neighborhood to the shared disk. To map the drive, you right-click on the drive and select Map Network Drive. The system brings up a dialog box where you can choose a free drive letter and a check box indicating whether this mapping is just until the system is rebooted or whether you want this drive mapping to happen each time the system comes up.
Typically it is not necessary to map every drive on every computer to a logical drive letter. It is so simple to navigate through the network neighborhood that mapping a drive letter adds little value. Three examples when mapped network drives can be handy are as follows:
With a network, however you can make very simple and convenient backups from one disk to another. The best approach is to purchase a separate large (can be slow) hard drive and install it in one of your computers and share the drive cross the network. This drive can be used to back up all of the computers in the home network. While it would be a good idea to back that disk drive up to tape from time to time, at least with the disk (for about $100), you have two copies of the data on all of the computers on your network.
Windows-98 has a basic scheduling capability built-into the operating system so the backups can be run late at night in an automated fashion. There are two basic ways to set up an automated backup:
Some newer printers can be purchased with a network adapter built into the printer. You can also purchase an external unit which connects a printer to the network. Given the ease of using a computer to connect your printer to the network, using a network attached printer is not commonly done in smaller networks. There are two basic ways to connect a printer directly to the network.
In the Microsoft vernacular, these two approaches are called Workgroup networking and Domain networking. Domain-style networking is designed for larger networks and centralizes much of the security configuration. Each user has an account on a Primary Domain Controller - passwords and account configuration are all stored on the domain controller computers. Workgroup-style networking allows each workstation to have its own security configuration. In the examples above, we were using workgroup style networking when we add a specific password to each shared drive and printer. If we were using domain style networking, we would have provided a list of users who were permitted to access the resource and the domain controller would have authenticated the users and given access to the resource.
Do use domain-style networking you must have an NT server, so all of the examples in the book are shown for the more typical workgroup-style networking which is typical in Windows non-server environments.
If you install an NT system and want it to interoperate well with your other workgroup systems, you should install it as a Stand-Alone Server instead of a Domain Controller. In the network control panel, you can install the NetBEUI software and configure the system with a workgroup and system name. Then the server can interoperate with the rest of the workgroup-style network clients.
The only other difference in setting up an NT server is how you set up access to the network drives. The simplest approach is to share drives without any passwords - but that gives poor security. A safer approach is to create a user account and password using the NT Server administration tools. Then the drivers and printers can be shared by All Users. This way, any user with a valid account and password can access the drives.
When mounting disks or printers from and NT server on a non-NT system such as Windows-98, the account and password come from two different places. First, the account is what you type into the initial Windows Networking login dialog when the system comes up. When you attempt to access the share over the network, you will be prompted for the password. To keep things simple, typically you would assign the same password to both the NT account and the shared files and printers on your non-NT systems.
In Windows-2000 and beyond, domain-style networking has been improved and extended and is called Windows Directory Services. Like NT domains, Directory Services centralizes much of the security configuration and is somewhat complicated for home use.
If you follow the steps above and the computer still does not appear in Network Neighborhood, it is possible to access the computer without using Network Neighborhood. Right click on the Network Neighborhood and launch Find Computer. Type in the computer name of the other computer. If the computer is functioning and connected to the network, you will be able to browse the computer. If you can find the computer this way, you know that it is functioning properly. If you can find and browse the computer, but it does not appear in Network Neighborhood, the problem is usually related to the login process.
If the login process seems counterintuitive, it is because Windows is trying to automatically handle the fact that there is a "local login" and a "network login". Windows-98 is trying to automate and coordinate both processes. If you end up with passwords that are causing problems, you can clear out all accounts and password by removing all of the files with the suffix "*.pwl" from the C:\WINDOWS subdirectory and reboot the computers. Make sure to log in with an account name and blank password when prompted for the Microsoft Network login. If during the log-in process, you are prompted for a Windows Login (a smaller window), use the same account name with a blank password.
This section provides some pointers as to where to get started and what to expect which trying to do file and printer sharing with other operating systems.
Games can be played across a local area network or across the Internet or a combination of both. It turns out that multiplayer games actually use a very small amount of network bandwidth so computers can quickly and easily exchange the information even over relatively slow networks.
Depending on the age of the computer game, it may use one of two network protocols to comunicate:
If you are playing on your LAN, you have a good reason to use fixed IP addresses rather than dynamically assigned IP addresses distributed via DHCP.
Generally, one system must act as a "master" system and the other systems will connect to that system. Unless you using a server across the Internet, you bring up one copy of the game as a master and then put the IP address of the master system into each of the client systems which are running the game.
IPX is not an Internet protocol so it only runs over the local area network but it has two advantages that led early multi-player games to choose IPX.
When you are running games which use IPX in a Windows environment, you must install the IPX protocol under Settings | Control Panel | Network Settings . You can find the protocol under the Microsoft protocols. Once installed, IPX needs no additional configuration.
You may encounter a strange situation when mixing different versions of IPX across different operating systems. It turns out that because the basic Ethernet protocol evolved over time, there are several "variants" of the protocol. Most mainstream protocols such as TCP/IP or NetBEUI choose the standard Ethernet protocol format. Novell actually supports more than one variant of the underlying Ethernet protocol. Example variants of the Ethernet protocol are: Ethernet II, 802.2, and 802.3. We won't delve into the (very insteresting) history of how these variants occured. All you need to know is that all of your IXP/Novell configurations must use the same underlying format. So if you are mixing DOS and Windows, or mixing different versions of the protocol, and you are having problems making connections, check the underlying Ethernet format for each of the systems.
There are three basic concepts which allow a VPN to use the public Internet to implement a VPN:
In a traditional Intranet, locations are connected by a long-distance leased line connected to routers at each location. When data needs to be transmitted from one location to another, the data is simply copied from one local area network, sent across the leased line, and then copied onto the local area network at the destination. Because the leased line is dedicated, typically no encryption is necessary.
In a VPN environment the process to move data from one location to another is quite different. The routers are replaced by VPN-capable routers. When a packet needs to be moved to the remote location, it is copied off the local area network and encrypted. Then the data is placed in TCP/IP packets (encapsulation) and sent across the Internet to the destination VPN router. At the destination, the data is reassembled as necessary, then decrypted and copied onto the local area network at the destination. This concept of encapsulating data in another protocol and sending it across the net is called tunneling. In a way the data is sent from the source to the destination through a "tunnel".
The net result is the same whether a VPN or Leased line is used to move the data. There may be cost and performance differences between the two approaches. Usually the VPN is less expensive, but sometimes, VPN gives better performance than a leased line solution.
Once the VPN adapter is installed on your computer, al of the VPN processing is done in software on your computer. The data is encrypted, encapsulated, and broken into packets in software in your computer. Then the packets are sent to the corporate VPN system across the Internet where they are decrypted and reassembled, and copied onto the local area network on the destination LAN. This allows you to operate as if you were directly connected to the corporate LAN, reading E-Mail, acessing files, and other operations.
Security is paramount to all VPN operation. There is the obvious password and account which gives you access to the VPN. Many companies add some type of external randomly generated security keys from a vendor such as SecureID (www.securid.com). These external security keys generate continuously changing random numbers. Each user has their own SecureID which is generating the same number sequence as the SecurID system is generating on the corporate LAN. You will only be granted access if you can enter the number displayed on your SecurID and it matches the number generated at the corporate LAN.
You can make use of your VPN, you must install and condifure the PN software for your computer. If you are using the Microsoft VPN adapter, it is available as an adapter in the network control panel. It makes sense that the VPN software appears to be a "virtual" network card. The VPN adapter is acting as a network card, accepting data packets and sending them to the VPN gateway.
In addition to installing the software, you will also have to configurae a few options for your particular VPN. Because VPN technology is evolving rapidly and there are many different protocols, software suites, and configuration options for each VPN, the best bet is to get help (or at least detailed instructions) from your corporate IT department.
Once configured properly, VPN is very easy to use, securre, and cost effective. While it is out of the scope of this book, you can set up your own VPN using a combination of the VPN software in Windows-98 and the VPN server software included in NT 4.0 and NT 2000. Building the remote end of a VPN using Windows 2000 is actually quite straightforward.