brd@icc.com (Brent Dickey) (05/30/91)
Hello Net experts, I am a neophyte trying to get into the network environment. I need the help of you big strong PC network experts. Hope that's enough sucking up, if not - oh well. I'm trying to help the family business get into the network age. They have bought a lot of PC's and printers and have now said we want them to work together. The office building has been wired with shielded 5 wire cable. This is not twisted pair cable, it's plain old serial cable wired in a star configuration. Their needs are simple and are probably very similar to many other small businesses. Printer sharing and file sharing. They do not need concurrent access to the files but would like to maintain them in a central location for backup purposes and the ability to move people to different PCs without having to move all files in the process. What I would like to find out is: - Can the existing wire be used in a 10 BaseT environment or will new cabling need to be pulled through the walls? - Has a public domain PC/NFS client been written to allow this kind of setup run with SOSS on one of the PCs? - Are there public domain DOS lpr and lpd programs that also exist so that the printers could be shared? - Is this at all feasible or am I running at 1200 baud in a 10 megabit world? NFS may not be the answer, it is just a starting point. Are there other public domain programs out there to accomplish the printer sharing and central file support? Any help on this matter would be most appreciative. If this works, maybe they'll put me back in their wills - nah. Brent Dickey You work with computers... brd@icc.com Maybe you can fix my TV.