34 C HAPTER 2 THE BASICS: NETWORKING SOFTWARE, SERVERS, AND SECURITY

FIGURE 2.3

Sample browse list from a command line

Note What’s with that \\ thing? Microsoft’s network software has, since 1985, used a way of writing the names of servers and of shares on servers called a Universal Naming Convention or UNC. It looks like \\servername\ sharename. So, for example, if I had a server named bigserver that contained a file share called mydata, I’d refer to that share as \\bigserver\mydata—that would be the UNC for that share. You’ll learn more about this in Chapter 11, on file shares, but I wanted to explain the mystifying \\ briefly here. And by the way, you pronounce “\\” as “whack- whack” in the Microsoft world. Now, to my way of thinking, that’d mean that a regular forward slash— / —would be pronounced “backwhack” in Microsoftese, but I’ve never gotten confirmation on that.

Each figure shows you the list of servers available: Aldebaran, Artemis, and Astro, just to list a few. Other servers—Daffy and MWM66—appear only in some of the browse lists because a few minutes passed between taking the screen shots, and a few “test” servers went up or down in those few minutes. In all three cases, the workstations that these screens were taken from got their browse lists from a local browse master.

You can drill down further into these browse lists, as well. In Windows 9x/Me, Windows NT 4, 2000, XP, or Server 2003 (in 2000, XP, or Server 2003, open My Network Places), you can double-click any one of those servers and see the list of shares that the servers offer; that too, is information from the browse list. In Windows for Workgroups or Windows NT 3.x, you’d just click a server once, and the list of its shares would appear in the bottom pane of the dialog box. From DOS or any other command line, you’d get the list of servers by typing net view, as you’ve already seen, and then you get the list of shares for any given server by typing net view \\\\\\\\servername, where servername is the name of the server whose shares you want to see.

When Browse Lists Get Too Large: Workgroups to the Rescue

As I’ve described them so far, browse lists seem pretty convenient. But in the little test network that I used for the previous screen shots, you saw only a few servers. Hell, everything works fine on small networks.

Now let’s talk about your network. Sit down at a corporate network of any size and you see dozens, hundreds, or thousands of servers. Scrolling down through a 500-server browse list would be a bit

WHAT’S THE POINT OF NETWORKS AND NETWORKING? 35

time-consuming—to say nothing of how much work the browse master would have to do to keep it up-to-date! The problem to solve is, then, managing the size of the browse list. There are two ways to do that:

◆ Reduce the number of servers in your enterprise.

◆ Divide the enterprise-wide browse list into several smaller browse lists called workgroups. Disable Peer-to-Peer Sharing on Workstations

The first answer is actually a bit off the main topic, but let me digress for a moment and talk about it before returning to the main item: workgroups. When I say, “Reduce the number of servers,” I’m talking about an unfortunate side effect of running Windows for Workgroups, Windows 9x/ME, Windows NT, 2000, or XP workstations—they all have the capability to become peer-to-peer servers. The browse masters don’t distinguish between industrial-strength servers running NT Server and low-octane peer-to-peer servers, so you could end up with a browse list that’s supposed to only list your servers, but actually lists all of your servers and workstations. In general, I think peer-to-peer networking is a bad idea. If a piece of data is important enough to be used by two employees, then it’s a company asset that should be backed up regularly and so should go on a managed file server, not a desktop machine that’s probably backed up once a decade. My recommendation is this: Disable the peer-to-peer sharing option on your Windows for Workgroups, Windows 9x/ME, Windows NT, 2000, and XP workstations. How you do this depends on the operating system of the work- stations in question. In NT 3.x and 4, open the Control Panel and then the Services applet; locate the service called Server and stop it, as well as disabling it for future reboots. In Windows 9x, go to Control Panel/Network/File and Print Sharing and make sure both options, to share files and printers, are unchecked. In Windows for Workgroups, make sure the sharing control in Network Setup is set not to enable file or printer sharing. In Windows 2000 and later, right-click My Computer and choose Manage, then find the Services _{folder and stop the Server service. (You’ll see more} about doing this later in the book.)

Not only will your network have less traffic—workstations will no longer have delusions of server- dom, so they won’t be chattering at the browse master all of the time—but not loading the server part of the workstation’s operating system saves RAM on the workstation.

Divide the Browse List into Workgroups

The other approach to keeping a browse list to a manageable size is to subdivide it in some way. That’s a reasonable thing to suggest if you realize that, no matter how large an organization seems to be, it’s usually composed of lots of smaller groups, such as Manufacturing, Sales, Marketing, Accounting, Finance, Personnel, Senior Management, and so on. Each of those groups can be called workgroups, and you can pretty much chop up your enterprise into workgroups in any way you like (but a rule of thumb says that a workgroup should be a group of people for whom 95 percent of the data generated by that group stays within that group).

From a more network-technical point of view, the minimum definition of a workgroup is just a group of workstations that share a browse list. (That’s my definition, not Microsoft’s.) The idea is that when someone in Accounting opens up her browse list, you want her to see just the Accounting servers, not the Manufacturing servers, as she has no use for the Manufacturing servers. (Besides,