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| Top | Networking Windows | Windows NT | Programming Windows |
By Eric Carr
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Keep an Eye on your Resources
WE'VE COME TO the final stop on our Net tour. This month, we'll wind down with a look at the Net Watcher utility, then pause to plan our tour of the mother of all networks -- the Internet. I know you're eager to get into your surfing gear, but we shouldn't skip any stops.
Use Net Watcher to monitor and control connections, shared directories, files and users on a particular computer. It's similar to the Windows NT Server Manager utility, so if you've used the NT version, you'll know how to use Net Watcher. Conversely, once you're familiar with Net Watcher, you'll be a pro when you get the NT version.
Before you install Net Watcher, make sure file and print sharing is operating on the computer you're using, as well as all the computers you plan to monitor. You can enable file and print sharing in two ways. Go to Control Panel/Network and select the Configuration tab. Click on the File And Print Sharing button, check both boxes and click on OK. You can get to the Configuration tab more quickly by right-clicking on the Network Neighborhood icon and selecting Properties.
Once file and print sharing is running, you can install Net Watcher. Select Add/Remove Programs from Control Panel. Next, choose the Windows Setup tab, highlight Accessories and click on Details. Select Net Watcher and click on OK. Click on OK again to install. You'll probably need your Windows 95 installation disk. To run the program, just click on Start/Run, then type netwatcher and press the Enter key.
To connect to another participating machine in your workgroup, click on the Select Server button or choose that function from the Administer menu. If you don't know the computer's name, browse through your workgroup until you find the right machine.
Net Watcher allows you to monitor resource usage by connection, user or file. With appropriate administrative privileges, you can share and unshare directories and disconnect users. This can be an effective tool for shutting down your network in preparation for a backup. Most backup applications require you to close a file before they can write it to tape or other media. (You do back up, don't you?) And many times someone opens a file used by many people and then goes to lunch. Although you may want to be known as the Grand Disconnector, I'd urge you to wield this power carefully. When users get disconnected suddenly, they can lose data. Try it out before you make it part of your toolkit to prevent network chaos.
The computing development that will have the most significant effect on your life is the commercialization of the Internet. You can accomplish an Internet connection in many ways, but the best way for you may not be the best for someone else. I'll start with the simple methods and move to the more complex connection scenarios.
Next on the map is a look at the tools you can use to explore this vast resource. I've been Windows 95-centric in past months, but the Internet is a different kettle of fish. Vendors are conceiving new Internet applications on a daily basis, and no one vendor can possibly include all the necessary tools for your explorations. So, in future columns I'll branch out and look at tools from different parties, such as gopher, ftp, telnet, Web browsers, Java applications and Internet chat.
First, you must connect to the Internet. Think about how you plan to use it; the Internet-based functions you employ will dictate your bandwidth (or throughput) requirements. Do you need only occasional e-mail access? Do you want to use a Web browser? Maybe host a Web site? Download or upload files? Work on a remote computer? Post and receive messages to newsgroups or list servers? These are a few of the major uses of the Internet today. Tomorrow, who knows?
Character data throughput is normally measured in kilobits per second. You'll also see it measured as kilobaud, or Kbaud. That's 1024 bits (1s and 0s) every second.
Most data is represented by seven or eight bits, and there's some bit housekeeping as well, so you can roughly assume 1Kb per second is equal to 100 characters of data per second.
Base your connection decision on the transmission speed of your link to the Internet and the persistence of the connection. Obviously, if you have a Web server, you'll want to have an Internet presence 24 hours a day, and you might have several hundred people accessing your server at once. For this type of application, you'll need a fast, continuous link to the Internet -- essentially, putting your Web server on the Internet. Contrast this with the need to send/receive e-mail a few times a day.
The connection profile for these two applications is very different. To maintain the Web server, you must be able to transmit and receive hundreds of thousands of bytes every second. To send an occasional e-mail, on the other hand, a few thousand bytes a day will do. Here's a good rule of thumb: For a console session on a remote computer or for e-mail, you'll need a minimum of a 9.6Kbps to 28.8Kbps dial-up connection. For a slow Web server and file downloads, you should have a 56Kbps dedicated connection. A fast Web server will require a 1.544Mb-per-second dedicated connection. But beware: The faster you go, the more it will cost.
In the simplest of cases -- occasional e-mail use -- you don't have to connect to the Internet per se. You can send e-mail through an intermediary service, also known as an online service, that has a mail gateway to the Internet. CompuServe, America Online, Prodigy, the Microsoft Network, GEnie and Delphi are examples of these online services. Most of them offer a variety of transmission rates, up to 28.8 Kbaud. This is sufficient for occasional use (certainly e-mail) and yes, you can use a Web browser at this speed. But the graphical nature of the Web and the size of the graphics images contained therein will make your modem work overtime just trying to keep up. You'll waste plenty of time watching the pictures slowly come in over the wire, too. It's analogous to "Well, you can run Windows 95 in 4MB of memory, but you wouldn't like the results." To use the Web effectively, you need to go faster.
Before you scoff at the idea of using an online service as your gateway to the Internet, consider that online services are inexpensive, starting at $10 per month, and most offer a free trial subscription. They also offer many other features you may find useful, such as chat rooms, news feeds, financial and weather information, extensive file archives, vendor forums and so on.
The benefit of online services is that hardware setup consists solely of your machine, a modem and a phone line. You don't have to worry about assigning IP addresses or exotic hardware (routers, CSUs and DSUs used to maintain a dedicated/near-dedicated Internet connection) or some hacker breaking into your system. You also don't have to deal with any special configuration to Windows 95 for Internet access. And, unlike services that provide you with dial-up access to a UNIX box, the online services have interfaces that are much easier to learn than a slew of UNIX commands (many of which don't have vowels). UNIX is incredibly powerful, but it's not for everyone.
Although setups vary, most services include communication software. If they don't, you can use the Windows 95 Terminal applet and your modem to connect to the remote service. It's that simple. If these services meet your needs, they represent the best way for you to connect to the Internet.
Contributing Editor Eric Carr is owner of F1, a Mountain View, Calif.-based consultancy. Contact Eric in the "Networking Windows" topic of WINDOWS Magazine's areas on America Online and CompuServe.To find his E-Mail ID Click Here
| Top | Networking Windows | Windows NT | Programming Windows |
By John D. Ruley
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What a Pearl
MY JOB IS like diving for pearls: Take a deep breath, dive in and find as much as you can before coming up for air. Right now I've got both the Windows NT 3.51 Resource Kit and a beta of Microsoft's Gibraltar Web server for NT. I could easily spend a month working my way through each of them, but who has the time?
What I have discovered between breaths is that Microsoft has gotten serious about the Internet, and that has major implications for folks running NT -- especially NT Server. That became apparent while I was diving through the new NT Re-source Kit.
The kit is an overwhelming collection of documentation, utility programs, tricks and tips that fills in the holes in the material shipped with NT (especially NT Server). Anyone running NT should have a copy. I'll go even further: If you have to choose between buying the Resource Kit and my own Networking Windows NT 3.51, buy the Resource Kit (then buy my book when you can afford it). The kit costs $200, but if you already have the NT 3.5 kit, you can get a $40 update that adds one new book and a single CD with all the utility programs. It will be the best $40 you ever spent, for two reasons: Perl and REXX.
If you've surfed the World Wide Web, you've seen Perl. Almost anytime you hit a Web page that does something interesting -- such as providing a query interface -- there's a Perl script in the background doing most of the work. Perl is a sophisticated interpreted script language originally developed for UNIX systems. It's now available for NT, and it's included on the 3.51 Resource Kit CD (in the RESKIT\PERL directory).
A word of warning: Perl is a full-blown programming environment. Don't expect to sit down with the Resource Kit and start writing system scripts the same day. I've been programming in various languages for 18 years, yet I'm a novice at Perl. If you have Web access (forget Perl if you don't because the documentation is provided via Web pages), you'll find a wealth of information at www.metronet.com/perlinfo/, including a pretty good FAQ file. You'll also find a list of books and magazine articles, and a large archive of sample scripts.
Perl's not the only scripting language included with the new Resource Kit. One of IBM's main selling points with OS/2 is REXX, an advanced interpreted scripting language with many of the same capabilities as Perl. Microsoft wisely chose not to force Perl down everyone's throat, and instead included a REXX port (Ataman Software) along with Perl on the 3.51 Resource Kit.
The Resource Kit update also includes a slew of new utility software. (For a rundown, check out my NTQA02.ZIP file in WinMag's America Online, CompuServe or ftp software libraries.)
What really surprised me in the software grab bag was a comparatively trivial utility called INET.EXE. In my days as an OS/2 LAN Manager system administrator, all network functions were performed using the NET.EXE command-line interface. I still tend to use it, so when I discovered INET.EXE, I almost fell out of my chair: It's a variant of NET.EXE that works over the Internet. For example, inet use x: \\ftp.microsoft.com \data turns Microsoft's Internet ftp server into a network drive. If you have STP, it can be a folder on your desktop. This may not seem like much, but think of the implications. While you're at it, review the rest of this column, in which I mention one Internet-related utility after another. Get the feeling Microsoft may be up to something?
For months now, we've heard rumors about Microsoft taking a big position on the Internet. In December, the company made it official. Here's the news for NT users: Microsoft will provide a plug-in upgrade to both Win95 and NT next year that integrates Web browsing capabilities with the Explorer desktop. Internet sites become icons and folders -- essentially identical to local resources -- and you can browse local resources using a Web-page-style view. Microsoft has also promised equivalent capabilities for Windows 3.x and Macintosh client systems. All you need to do is download them. And Microsoft's new Internet Information Server (IIS), formerly known by the code name Gibraltar, will come bundled with the next version of NT Server. By the time you read this, a version of IIS for NT Server 3.51 should be downloadable from Microsoft's Internet site or available on CD for a nominal fee.
IIS is easy to set up. It took me less than 15 minutes, and I'd never run a Web server. It also comes with predefined sample pages, so there's no guesswork about whether you set it up properly. And it has nice, built-in database support (using 32-bit ODBC drivers). I got a set of demo queries working with Microsoft SQL Server in another 10 minutes. It includes sophisticated management tools for supporting anything from a completely secure in-house Web (using Secure Sockets Layer encryption) to anonymous-only Internet access. And it's all in a single box, nicely shrink-wrapped and well documented.
If you weren't planning to set up a Web site, this probably strikes you as not very important. Au contraire! Think through the combination: free Web browsing software included with Win95 and NT, or available for the price of one download for Windows 3.x and Macintosh, and free Web server software (with NT Server). This makes NT the first network operating system to offer built-in intranet (or private Web) support. You can make your in-house network as easy to browse as the Internet.
I have to give Microsoft the "brilliant" nod this month for integrating Web support into NT. That's nothing but good news for NT users.
In the bogus department, Adobe gets a Bronx cheer. A few weeks before I wrote this column, WINDOWS Magazine got a letter from a disgusted reader who'd bought PageMaker 6.0, which has the Windows 95 logo. The reader believed Microsoft's propaganda about Windows 95 logo-compliant applications supporting NT. When he tried it under NT, it worked but he had some printing problems. When he called Adobe for support, he was told, "We don't support Windows NT."
When I confronted Microsoft's NT Workstation group product manager Megan Bliss about this, she