MB> 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 about 
 RJT> it,  never having used it before.  Is it usable for some simple 
 RJT> file and printer sharing?  If it's looking at all usable in 
 RJT> this context,  what kind of limitations am I looking at and 
 RJT> when would it be practical to move to something else?  (In 
 RJT> other words,  if this guy's gotta spend some more money I need 
 RJT> to be able to go to him and tell him _why_ he needs to spend 
 RJT> some more money...   :-)
 MB> Well, WfWG has real peer-to-peer networking support.  You need 
 MB> to be running Windows to see the network, however, and this is 
 MB> something of a limitation.
I had thought this was likely to be the case.
 MB> You can install the free Microsoft Client for DOS to allow a 
 MB> non-Windows machine to act as a client for a WfWG network, but 
 MB> getting a DOS machine to act as a server requires the Microsoft 
 MB> Workgroup Add-On for DOS, which is a sufficiently obscure 
 MB> product that you might even have trouble finding it.
I'm still not clear on exactly what it is that he wants to *do* with this 
setup,  except to be able to exchange files and share printers,  and it's 
further complicated by the fact that the guy who bought the package has been 
out this whole week and won't be back until next tuesday.  He's supposed to 
have made the arrangements,  so he's going to have to deal with the problem, 
I'm told.   
 MB> One good point about the WfWG network is that it uses standard 
 MB> NetBIOS over NetBEUI by default, and is interoperable with all 
 MB> other users of this protocol from Windows 95 and Windows NT to 
 MB> OS/2 Warp Connect.  There is also a decent free TCP/IP stack 
 MB> for WfWG available from Microsoft, and this allows WfWG to use 
 MB> NetBIOS over TCP/IP (TCPBEUI) so that it can interoperate with 
 MB> Unix Samba.
Sounds real good to me for some of the stuff that I want to do,  but in there 
I'm still working on getting all of the machines running at the same DOS and 
windows versions!  I don't think that he's going to be ready for much of this 
stuff.
 MB> WfWG should run over any Ethernet card which has NDIS driver 
 MB> support.
I don't know if these cards qualify or not.  When I had started to look over 
the Lantastic books,  they made mention of possible software drivers needed 
to be loaded for any given cards and possible configuration programs to set 
them up,  but I haven't found any of these yet.  Heck,  there are supposed to 
be four network cards around the place and I've only found three of them so 
far.
 MB> It can also use an ODI stack through an NDIS shim if necessary.
You lost me completely on that one.
 MB> There are other capabilities in WfWG, but you would not care 
 MB> about things like IPX support unless you were running a Novell 
 MB> NetWare server.  If you are doing a clean install for a 
 MB> facility which has no working network that has to be kept, then 
 MB> NetBIOS over NetBEUI is the logical choice, except that NetBIOS 
 MB> over TCP/IP (TCPBEUI) is worth doing if the network will grow 
 MB> to more than one segment or if Unix Samba interoperation is an 
 MB> issue.
I expect the number and variety of machines in there to grow over time,  but 
I don't think that there's much likelihood of him wanting to run OS/2 or unix 
variants in there,  unless he's really serious about the web server that came 
up on one occasion.  I don't think he's got any idea of what he's looking at 
there either,  though,  and once I complete his education on that a bit 
further I suspect that he'll be using a local provider and storing stuff on 
_their_ machine with local backup.
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