Workshop

allows you to manage them and check their configuration from one place. The components include the
following:
• Clients—These components enable your PC to use a service over a network.
• Network adapters—These components and protocols do the setup necessary for you to
communicate on the network.
• Protocols
• Services—As discussed in Hour 1, services are programs that offer information or resources to
the network.
I’ll treat these components separately in the following sections. We’ll start off by discussing clients and
then move on to binding, the process of letting your workstation know which network components are
hooked to one another.
Clients
To talk to any other computer, whether it’s another Windows PC or that beefy server in the data center,
you always need a client. Most times, a client is simply a program that allows Windows to treat server or
workgroup resources as though they resided on the local workstation. This is usually accomplished
through file and print redirection—that is, your G: drive is actually a server drive or your friend Eddie’s
CD-ROM drive, LPT3 is actually the printer connected to Gloria’s printer, and so on. (I get deep into
client and generic file and print troubleshooting in Hour 18, “Lots of Different People in Your
Neighborhood.”)
In order for you to perform drive and printer redirection, you must add driver software to Windows. You
add this software by going to your Control Panel and selecting Network, which gives you the dialog box
shown in Figure 11.3. Because the Control Panel shows that I have the client for Microsoft Networks and
the Novell IntranetWare client loaded, I should be able to talk to both Microsoft and Novell networks.
Cool.
Figure 11.3 The Network Control Panel, where most Windows networking functions are configured,
including network cards, protocols, and clients for file and print networking.
Of course, different folks have different strokes, so your different types of servers need different types of
clients. Some common ones include the following: