Datasheet

Organizing Networks
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✦ When you run into trouble, the advice you hear over and over again
(especially in the Vista Help and Support Center) is “talk to your
teacher,” uh, “contact your system administrator.” That advice is every
bit as useless now as it was when you were five.
When networks work right — which they do about 90 percent of the time in
Vista — they really are simple.
Organizing Networks
To understand an abstract computer concept, nothing works better than a
solid analogy. I use lots of them in this book: A document is like a sheet of
paper; a CPU is like a car engine; a modem is like a high-tech hearing aid with
a pronounced stutter set to “max” at a Nine Inch Nails concert. You know
what I mean.
That’s the problem with configuring networks. No really good analogies exist
for all the bits and pieces. Yes, you can say that a server is like a gatekeeper,
or a hub is like a collection of tap-dancing monkeys at a hyperactive organ-
grinder’s convention, but all the analogies fall flat in short order. Why?
Because networks are different from what you experience day to day. So
without benefit of a good analogy, I shall forge ahead anyway.
Understanding servers and serfs
Two fundamentally different kinds of networks exist. They both use the same
basic kind of hardware — cables, boxes, interface cards, and so on. They
both talk the same basic kind of language — Ethernet and something called
TCP/IP, usually, but a few renegades speak in tongues. They differ primarily
on a single, crucial philosophical point.
In one kind of network, a leader, a top-dog PC, controls things. The leader
is called (you guessed it) a
server. I still get shivers down my spine at the
Orwellian logic of it all. In this kind of network, the lowly serf PCs are called
clients. Thus, this type of network gets the moniker client/server. Microsoft
calls this kind of network a
domain. If you’ve ever wondered how in the
realm of the English language a “client” could be all that much different from
a “server,” now you know: In the topsy-turvy world of PC networking termi-
nology, a server is really a master.
Client/server networks abound in large companies, where central control is
crucial. Network administrators set up security rules, grant access where
needed, allow new users to operate client PCs, and generally ride herd on
the entire network. Usually the server(s) hold important corporate files
and backup copies of key files on the client computers. Usually the major
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