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1. Peer Services

   1. Capabilities

      1. Communications among workstations in relatively close proximity (i.e. on a LAN).

         • LAN is an acronym for Local Area Network. Although the term "Local" varies by manufacturer, remember that nearly all workstations in a LAN are connected by cable, so you are obviously not going to have the computers across the city or country from each other! Practically speaking, all computers in a LAN are usually in the same office suite or home.

      2. All workstations are of equal rank. That means no computer is dedicated to serving the others. Such a computer would be called a server, and its presence would violate the definition of a peer network.

      3. Peer Services uses normal OS/2 techniques to access remote resources.

         • Peer Services installs below the File Management layers of OS/2, so that, unlike TCP/IP, accesses to other (i.e. remote) workstations are carried out by using the ordinary device and path techniques used everywhere else by OS/2. Access to remote directories, for example, is achieved by assigning them device names that are undefined on the local workstation. Once the assignment is made, everything that can be performed with a normal pathname/filename can be performed on the remote workstation.

         • As an example of the kind of power this puts at your disposal, with this type of LAN it is as easy to automatically back up all the disk drives on the entire LAN from one computer as it is to back up of the drives of one computer. Trying to do this using only TCP/IP would be, at best, very difficult.

   2. Disadvantages

      1. Restrictive

         • Probably the biggest drawback to Peer Services is that you are completely cut-off from other computers, notably those on the Internet. You have wonderful access to computers on your LAN, but no access to anything else.

      2. High Management

         • This could be a subjective reaction but it seems to me that Peer Services is somewhat fussy, and is what we might call a "high management" component, at least when compared with TCP/IP services. I'm sure there are others who feel differently.

2. The Combined LAN - The best of both worlds.

   This is essentially the reason I've installed both Peer Services and TCP/IP in the LAN I'm configuring in this series of articles--and why I've built my LAN at home the same way. In this way each workstation has the superb file/directory access to the other stations, and each workstation also has full and complete access to the Internet. If you are fortunate enough to have high-speed internet access such as xDSL or internet on cable, each of your workstations can have full access to its capabilities. Moreover each workstation will have the benefit of any firewall protection you build into the machine connected to the modem. (You have added a firewall, haven't you?)

—Walter Metcalf