- TCP/IP-Ethernet Tower of Babel Breeds Confusion
- The TCP/IP Model
- How OS Works
With that said, I want to turn my attention to making resources available over a network. If you really stop and think about it, the whole reason for building a network in the first place is so that resources can be shared among multiple computers. Resources come in a lot of different forms. Often, sharing resources means sharing files or folders, but not always. At the time that I first got started in networking, printers were very expensive, and it was not uncommon to see companies build networks so that a single printer could be shared by multiple employees. This saved the company from having to purchase and maintain a printer for every single employee.
Even small, home networks are all about sharing resources. The most common type of home network involves a wireless access point that also serves as an Internet router. On these types of networks, the Internet connection is the resource that is being shared. There is simply no reason to have a separate Internet connection for every computer, when the Internet connection can easily be shared.
As you can see, there are many different types of resources that can be shared on a network. The actual process for sharing the resource varies depending on the type of resource that is being shared and on the network operating systems that are being used. That being the case, I will begin my discussion by talking about how you can share files and folders on a network.
Before I Begin
Before I get started, I want to quickly mentioned that the information that I'm about to give you is based on Windows Server 2003. Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, and every previous version of Windows handle file and folder sharing in basically the same way. The actual steps that you use in the sharing process varies slightly from one Windows operating system to another, but the basic underlying concepts are the same. Windows Vista takes a different approach to sharing files than its predecessors do. That being the case, I will talk about filesharing and Windows Vista later on in this series. For right now though, just keep in mind that most of what I'm about to show you doesn't apply to Vista.
Creating A File Share
If you want to share in the files that are stored on a server, you'll have to first create a file share. A file share is essentially a designated entry point through which users can access the files. The reason why a file share is necessary is because it would be a huge security risk to share the full contents of the server.
Creating a file share is simple. To do so, begin the process by creating a folder in the location where you want the shared data to reside. For example, many file servers have a designated storage array or a data drive whose sole purpose is to store data (as opposed to program files and operating system components).
In most cases, you'll probably have quite a few folders worth of data that you need to share. It is also common for each of these folders to have its own unique security requirements. You can create a separate share for each folder, but doing so is usually considered to be a bad idea unless each share resides on a different volume. There are exceptions to every rule, but in most cases you will only want to create one file share per volume. You can place all of your folders within this single file share, and then assign the necessary permissions on a per folder basis. As this discussion progresses, you'll begin to understand why creating multiple file sharers is such a bad idea.
