For your network to operate properly, each computer on the network must use software that supports networking.
Operating systems
Network-ready operating systems such as Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000 Me, Windows 2000 Professional and Windows NT allow the devices on a network to properly communicate with each other. If your business is like most businesses, your computers already have an operating system that's ready for a network.
Network software protocols
Just because you have the proper operating system doesn't necessarily mean that your network will run the way you want. Special controls in a network operating system, called protocols, must be present in your operating system to ensure that the programs you run on the network-including Accounting Plus-are able to send and receive messages with the other computers on the network. These protocols determine how messages are delivered across the network. Fortunately, these protocols are already present in most network-ready operating systems; the most you might need to do is activate them (we'll perform this step later in these lessons).
What network software does Accounting Plus require?
The operating systems that work well for peer-to-peer networks include Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000 Me, Windows 2000 Professional and Windows NT. These operating systems support the NetBIOS, NetBEUI and TCP/IP protocols, of which one must be active on your system to run Accounting Plus. Windows networks are easy systems to set up and maintain; in addition, these systems support the dual-speed 10/100MBps Ethernet/Fast Ethernet network interface cards.
We'll discuss how to check your computers to see whether the proper protocols are enabled.
More information about NetBIOS, NetBEUI and TCP/IP
Interested in these strangely named network protocols? Here's some basic information about how each protocol works.
NetBIOS and NetBEUI Several years ago, IBM and Microsoft developed NetBIOS (Network Basic Input Output System) and NetBEUI (NetBIOS Extended User Interface) with the goal of drawing up network protocols that would work on small networks of Windows computers. The design goal was to build small and fast protocols that would allow for human-assigned names of devices, such as "MyComputer," that are easy to remember.
The assumption was that there were only a few devices on the network and that devices would be appearing and disappearing at random. Therefore, it was best to be able to locate a device by "broadcasting" a packet of data across the entire network until the device for which the data was intended was found. NetBIOS and NetBEUI were designed to use this broadcast method as the sole means of locating devices.
When one device needs to communicate with another device in a NetBIOS/NetBEUI network, it broadcasts a packet of data to find the remote system. (For example, if Computer1 is trying to send data to an Accounting Plus company file on Computer2, Computer1 will broadcast its intentions to the entire network-in effect, it will say, "Where is Computer2?"-until it finds Computer2.) Obviously, a large network could become bogged down in all this broadcasting, so NetBIOS and NetBEUI networks are generally restricted to 30 or fewer devices.
Once a device has found the device with which it wants to communicate on the NetBIOS/NetBEUI network, the two devices can communicate directly. However, there are times when this process breaks down, and the computers will need to find each other through the broadcast process.
TCP/IP TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) is the protocol that's used in many large networks-including the Internet-but is increasingly popular in smaller networks, as well, mainly because of its speed.
As opposed to NetBIOS and NetBEUI, TCP/IP has a much more direct method of transferring data from one device to another. Each computer in a TCP/IP network is assigned a specific, unique IP address that identifies the computer to the network and the rest of the world. All IP addresses are stored in a centralised registry or a distributed directory service, often located within a company using a router, or outside of a company at an Internet Service Provider (ISP).
When one device needs to communicate with another device in a TCP/IP network, it sends a packet of data to the centralised registry. The registry then locates the intended device's IP number and directs the packet immediately to that device. (For example, if Computer1 is trying to send data to an Accounting Plus company file on Computer2, Computer1 will send its request to the centralised registry. The registry will then pass on Computer1's request directly to Computer2.) This direct process eliminates the possibly time-consuming NetBIOS/NetBEUI work of "broadcasting" to all devices on the network.
Like the NetBIOS/NetBEUI process, once a device has found the device with which it wants to communicate on a TCP/IP network, the two devices can communicate directly. Since each device on a TCP/IP network has a fixed address by which it is identified, however, the devices rarely lose contact with each other until the connection is intentionally broken.