 | Randy Johnston
has been involved in computing for over 25 years. In addition to being a top-rated and entertaining speaker presenting technology seminars worldwide for K2 Enterprises (www.k2e.com), he is also Executive Vice-President and Co-owner of Network Management Group, Inc., a full-service computer networking and service company. Randy recently published Technology Best Practices for Wiley Publishing. You may contact Randy by e-mail at randyj@nmgi.com, or by phone at (620) 664-6000. |
Computers & Software
2001-07-01 09:02:00
Disappearing hardware
Question: I run my business from my home. I have 4 computers connected via peer to peer in a LAN. The computer I use contains most of the files the other stations use. For some reason, every so often, I have hardware and software disappear. For instance, I can be printing something on my laser printer then print another document and the error message says "no printer found". Another example is I have a scanner for doing graphics. Sometimes... again in the middle of doing scanning... I will get an error message that says "no scanner found". This is most frustrating as you can imagine. Where would you begin to fix the problem?
Answer: Intermittent problems like you have described can be very frustrating. I may not have all the facts I need to address every issue, but let's give it a shot, and I will follow up with you more individually if necessary.Your peer to peer network is a very common configuration, particularly since Microsoft began building this into Windows in April 1993. The mechanism that they use to let the computers and devices talk to each other is a software protocol interface known as NetBIOS. This technology is fragile at best, and will often lose communications because of overflows in buffers, and other settings that can be adjusted. However, Windows is not very friendly at letting you adjust these settings, and there is a better way to fix this problem. Simply add additional, more reliable protocols to all of your machines. We will often recommend the proactive (or active) protocol IPX, which was commonly supported by Novell NetWare, and appears in all Microsoft operating systems. Another protocol that can be loaded is TCP/IP, which is a passive protocol. You probably have this loaded because of accessing the Internet, but this protocol is not as likely to fix the problem as IPX (active vs. passive).Another issue could be that you are using a non-dedicated server in your peer to peer LAN. Non-dedicated servers are nowhere near as reliable as dedicated servers. However, your size of four stations is in the safe zone. We normally allow non-dedicated servers up to 12 users, but begin to caution companies at the five user level. You may want to consider purchasing an additional server, and make it a dedicated server, even in your small home-based business LAN. The cost of a server is very small compared to the cost of lost productivity of your people, lost files, and worse yet, lost business.
