Roy J. Tellason wrote in a message to all:
 RJT> Or,  from what I understand,  WFWG allows some sort of
 RJT> "networking" potential there,  but I don't know anything
 RJT> about it,  never having used it before.  Is it usable for
 RJT> some simple file and printer sharing?  If it's looking at
 RJT> all usable in this context,  what kind of limitations am I
 RJT> looking at and when would it be practical to move to
 RJT> something else?  (In other words,  if this guy's gotta spend
 RJT> some more money I need to be able to go to him and tell him
 RJT> _why_ he needs to spend some more money...   :-)
Well, WfWG has real peer-to-peer networking support.  You need to be running 
Windows to see the network, however, and this is something of a limitation.  
You can install the free Microsoft Client for DOS to allow a non-Windows 
machine to act as a client for a WfWG network, but getting a DOS machine to 
act as a server requires the Microsoft Workgroup Add-On for DOS, which is a 
sufficiently obscure product that you might even have trouble finding it.
One good point about the WfWG network is that it uses standard NetBIOS over 
NetBEUI by default, and is interoperable with all other users of this 
protocol from Windows 95 and Windows NT to OS/2 Warp Connect.  There is also 
a decent free TCP/IP stack for WfWG available from Microsoft, and this allows 
WfWG to use NetBIOS over TCP/IP (TCPBEUI) so that it can interoperate with 
Unix Samba.
WfWG should run over any Ethernet card which has NDIS driver support.  It can 
also use an ODI stack through an NDIS shim if necessary.
There are other capabilities in WfWG, but you would not care about things 
like IPX support unless you were running a Novell NetWare server.  If you are 
doing a clean install for a facility which has no working network that has to 
be kept, then NetBIOS over NetBEUI is the logical choice, except that NetBIOS 
over TCP/IP (TCPBEUI) is worth doing if the network will grow to more than 
one segment or if Unix Samba interoperation is an issue.
 
-- Mike
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