From: fhl@milton.u.washington.edu (Dean Pentcheff)
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.networking
Subject: Re: Small LAN questions
Summary: Yes, you can make a small peer-to-peer LAN using IBM's TCP/IP
Date: 25 Jan 93 02:06:11 GMT
Article-I.D.: shelley.1jvhujINN19k
Reply-To: dean2@tbone.biol.scarolina.edu (Dean Pentcheff)
Followup-To: comp.os.os2.networking
Organization: Department of Biology, University of South Carolina, Columbia
NNTP-Posting-Host: milton.u.washington.edu

verstee@gaul.csd.uwo.ca (Ronald Versteegh) writes:
>	I am looking for OS/2 networking software that will allow
>me to connect 3 computers (PCs) together in a peer to peer network.
>Will IBM's TCP/IP do this ? Can Lantastic for DOS be made to work ?
>Any help would be appreciated...  Thanks in advance, Ron.

Yes, IBM's TCP/IP software can do this.  I don't know if Lantastic will
run under DOS atop OS/2.

With the base TCP/IP package alone, you can do a little.  It gives you
Ethernet communications with a few character-oriented communications
programs.  FTP will let you copy files back and forth (explicitly);
telnet will let you get a character-mode login on another OS/2 (or
other) machine.  The LPD/lprmon programs will let you use a printer
attached to one machine from all the other machines.  This works pretty
transparently: you set up lprmon on the client machines, it snatches
output sent to the parallel port(s) of your choice, and forwards the
stuff on to the LPD program running on the printer's machine.  From the
users' point of view, they just tell their program to print to LPT1,
LPT2, etc. to send stuff off to networked printers.  Multiple jobs
arriving simultaneously at the printing host are sorted out properly.

If you add on the NFS package, you can share disk drives.  All or part
of any machine's disk space can be made available for other machines to
use (in either read/write mode or read-only mode).  As far as the other
machines are concerned, the remotely mounted chunks of disk look like
additional drives.  At present there are a few glitches with the
integration of the NFS drives (e.g. drag-and-drop file copying doesn't
work correctly, though command line "copy this that" works fine).  All
the DOS or OS/2 programs I've used access the NFS networked disk space
quite happily.

For example, I keep all my personal files on a Sparc IPC running
SunOS.  When I walk up to any OS/2 machine in my lab, I double-click on
my login icon, provide my login name and password, and suddenly a drive
D: appears, with all my files and directories on the Sparc.  I read and
write files using Word and Word Perfect (Windows versions), edit files
with an OS/2 vi-clone, and do statistics with DOS-based stat packages.
When I'm done, I click on a "logoff" icon, and the D: drive
disappears.  

Works well for us.  Oh, with one recent exception.  Printing died
recently and I was called in to diagnose.  Couldn't figure out what was
wrong - jobs were queuing up, but just not coming out on the printer.
After a while I figured it out.  Someone in our lab who hadn't been
there much since the networking had, in a futile attempt to print,
physically recabled the printer to the computer where they were
working...  Which of course was sending its output to the print server
computer...  Oh well.  Replugged the printer, and all the jobs came
spewing out.

-Dean
--
[NOTE: my email address is different from where I read and post net news.]
Dean Pentcheff  (Internet: dean2@tbone.biol.scarolina.edu) (803) 777-8998
Department of Biology, University of South Carolina, Columbia SC 29205
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.networking