Sams Teach Yourself Network Troubleshooting in 24 Hours, Second Edition

The File and Print Blues

The underpinning of a file and print client is, of course, the vendor-supplied client you load on the workstation. The dominant file and print client is, of course, the “Client for Microsoft Networks,” which is included with every copy of Windows, and uses the SMB (Server Message Block) file and print protocol. There are other clients, the most common of which deal with either native Novell file and print (Novell Core Protocol, or NCP), or native UNIX file and print (Network File System, or NFS).

How do clients work? Even though the clients might look simple, they are, of course, complex internally. In order to make your file sharing and print sharing effortless for you, here are some of the things that any given client ...