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Pragma · 08-14-2003, 02:18 PM

Ok, I'd love to help you, but you're going to have do several things.

First, you need to use at some proper spelling. Punctuation is also a good thing to have, an ellipsis is not the same as a period. Also, how about some paragraph breaks? Now that I've vented, time to make my head hurt deciphering what you're saying:

You've got a variety of computers - running various OSes between 95 and XP - and you want to network them together. Piece of cake, buy a hub or a switch. Linksys 8 Port WorkGroup Hubs should do the trick just fine. About 60$ or so from the right place. Then you need to buy some Cat5 ethernet cable to string them all to the hub, and the physical aspect of your network is set up.

You want to share files? Well, this is where filesharing gets a little tricky - if you want to do access control, you're going to have a major headache (I'll get to this in a minute). You can share everything to all users as full access and you'll have no problems sharing files and printers. If you want to have permissions on the file shares, you can either go with domains (I really don't recommend it in your case), or you can do workgroup sharing, which means that you have to have a big list of usernames and passwords (and which computer the accounts were created on) - and make sure that the right people have the right passwords.

Next up: Internet access sharing. Piece of cake - set up one of the WinXP boxes with a modem, turn on the built-in firewall for it, and enable Internet Connection Sharing. Now, everything else on the inside of your network should be able to (by setting the network adapters to DHCP) connect to the internet.

Finally: Quickbooks programs accessing the same file so that it's updated whenever someone changes something. Now, I don't know anything about Quickbooks, but I'm inclined to say that this is flat out impossible. When a computer opens a file, it places a "lock" on it. This tells the operating system "hey, someone is using this file. if anyone else wants to look at it, it's read only." When the file is closed, the lock is removed.

If you place the Quickbooks file on a network share, you can have multiple people read it at once, but only one person will ever be able to write to it at once - and everyone else will have to close and reload the file to see the changes.

08-14-2003, 02:18 PM	#2 (permalink)
Pragma I am Winter Born Location: Alexandria, VA	Ok, I'd love to help you, but you're going to have do several things. First, you need to use at some proper spelling. Punctuation is also a good thing to have, an ellipsis is not the same as a period. Also, how about some paragraph breaks? Now that I've vented, time to make my head hurt deciphering what you're saying: You've got a variety of computers - running various OSes between 95 and XP - and you want to network them together. Piece of cake, buy a hub or a switch. Linksys 8 Port WorkGroup Hubs should do the trick just fine. About 60$ or so from the right place. Then you need to buy some Cat5 ethernet cable to string them all to the hub, and the physical aspect of your network is set up. You want to share files? Well, this is where filesharing gets a little tricky - if you want to do access control, you're going to have a major headache (I'll get to this in a minute). You can share everything to all users as full access and you'll have no problems sharing files and printers. If you want to have permissions on the file shares, you can either go with domains (I really don't recommend it in your case), or you can do workgroup sharing, which means that you have to have a big list of usernames and passwords (and which computer the accounts were created on) - and make sure that the right people have the right passwords. Next up: Internet access sharing. Piece of cake - set up one of the WinXP boxes with a modem, turn on the built-in firewall for it, and enable Internet Connection Sharing. Now, everything else on the inside of your network should be able to (by setting the network adapters to DHCP) connect to the internet. Finally: Quickbooks programs accessing the same file so that it's updated whenever someone changes something. Now, I don't know anything about Quickbooks, but I'm inclined to say that this is flat out impossible. When a computer opens a file, it places a "lock" on it. This tells the operating system "hey, someone is using this file. if anyone else wants to look at it, it's read only." When the file is closed, the lock is removed. If you place the Quickbooks file on a network share, you can have multiple people read it at once, but only one person will ever be able to write to it at once - and everyone else will have to close and reload the file to see the changes. __________________ Eat antimatter, Posleen-boy!