Datasheet

Organizing Networks
676
At different times, in different places, Microsoft calls peer-to-peer networks
by the following names:
✦ Workgroups and/or workgroup networks
✦ Small-office networks and/or small-business networks
✦ Home networks
The Windows Vista Help and Support Center also, on occasion, refers to
peer-to-peer networks as, uh, peer-to-peer networks. They all mean the
same thing.
Traditionally, client/server networks (see the preceding section) dangled
all the shared peripherals off the server. Fifteen years ago, your office’s big
laser printer was probably connected directly to the server. The massive
bank of 2GB hard drives no doubt lived on the server, too. Even today, you
hear reference to
print servers and file servers in hushed tones, as if only the
server itself were capable of handling such massive processing demands.
Nowadays, you can buy a laser printer out of petty cash — although you
better have a line in the budget for toner and paper — and 500GB hard
drives fit on the head of a pin. Well, almost.
Peer-to-peer networks dispense with the formality of centralized control.
Every authorized administrator on a particular PC — find out more about
administrators in Book II, Chapter 2 — can designate any drive, folder, or
piece of hardware on that PC as shared, and thus make it accessible to
anyone else on the network.
In a peer-to-peer network (a
workgroup), any administrator on a given PC can
share anything on that PC. If you’re the least bit concerned about security,
that fact should give you pause, high blood pressure, and intense anxiety
attacks. Not to mention apoplexy. Say you set up a home office network
using the standard Vista Home Basic settings. The network that is installed
is a peer-to-peer network, quite frequently with no passwords. That means
anyone can walk up to a Welcome sign-on screen, click one of the usernames,
and immediately designate every drive as shared. The entire process would
take less than 30 seconds. From that point on, anybody who can get to any
of the computers on the network would have full control over all the files on
the shared drive — anybody can read, change, and even delete them perma-
nently, without the benefit of the Recycle Bin.
The primary distinguishing factor among PCs in a peer-to-peer network lies
in the shared hardware hanging off an individual PC. Refer to Figure 1-2, for
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