Geek Certs Blog

In business, you must know how to use PowerPoint.

Think of PowerPoint as an application that is like a slide show. You probably remember your parents, showing their friends, or you if you were unlucky, a slide show from a trip they took. Some might refer to this as PowerPoint lite.

Using PowerPoint, you can take that slide show to your computer and add cool graphics, sounds, and lots more. Instead of using the old slide carousel we might have used in the past, we can now show it on our computer.

Small networks can operate just fine in what is called a peer-to-peer environment. A small network, a typical home network, is made up of 10 or less computers. Each computer is equal to the others and each one manages its own resources (e.g., shared folders, printers, and login data).

Once you move above 10 computers though, things begin to get messy. As an example, consider a small neighborhood of new houses. With a few houses, homeowners can get together and arbitrate how their common roads will be fixed, settle arguments between homeowners, and the like. This informal management structure is similar to the peer-to-peer network described above.

However, add a few more streets of homes and we see the need for a more formal structure of management. An example would be a homeowner’s association. The association determines membership, rules for the community, and so on. This more structured environment is similar to what is called a client/server network, where a server manages resources and logins. Generally, when a network reaches 10 computers or more, it is wise to move from peer-to-peer to a client/server network.

A client/server network is also known as a domain, which is, again, the community created and managed by the server or servers responsible for the domain. We’ll touch on this more later.

Servers, as you may know, are computers specially built to handle a heavy load on its resources. For example, a server might have 4 network adapters, 32 GB of RAM, 5 hard drives configured to work together (some type of RAID configuration), and expensive, high quality processors (such as four, Xeon Duo-core processors). On top of all of this beefed-up hardware is installed a server operating system. Server operating system examples are Windows Server 2000 or 2003, Unix, or Novell NetWare 6.0.

NetWare is almost dead since Novell recently announced it was abandoning that operating system and teaming up with Dell to produce computers running SuSe Linux, which is owned by Novell.

Servers can provide a sort of ‘gated community’ environment because they mandate which people can log into the network, which computers can be part of the network, which resources can be shared and accessed by people and computers, and what applications can be installed on computers that are part of the domain. Further, servers can dictate IP address (DHCP or dynamic host configuration protocol) and help with matching up IP addresses with computer names (DNS or domain naming system).

In addition, the server can grant users remote access to the network through a service called Remote Access Services, or RAS. RAS users typically use their own network to access the Internet and log into the network using a special socket which is set up and distributed to RAS clients by the network administrator, or NA.

Many networks are still running Server 2000, but new installations run Server 2003. Microsoft also sells a product named Small Business Server. This package includes licensing for Server 2003, SQL Server 2005, and Microsoft Office 2003. All of this is installed on the server and allows up to five computers (also known as Client Access Licenses, or CALs) to connect to the server simultaneously.

Server operating systems come in many editions, depending on the needs of your organization. Server 2003, for example, can be purchased in Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter, or Web editions. The size of the organization helps us select between Standard and Enterprise. If we manage large databases, we might opt for the Datacenter edition whereas if we only host our Web site on the server, we would select the Web edition. These all look and operate similarly. What’s different is under the hood, so to speak. Each edition is optimized for its intended operating environment.

Servers aren’t very useful without clients. Clients are computers running Windows 2000, XP Professional, or Vista. Clients are added to the domain and are used by people who are allowed to log into the domain using a domain user account. If a user does not have a valid user account, this means that they cannot login and use any resources that are part of the domain. Of course, all of these rules are administered by the server, also known as a domain controller.

I hope this short discussion of a very large topic piques your interest and motivates you to install Server 2003 in a virtual environment such as Virtual PC 2007. This would be a great way to introduce yourself to a server operating system.

The Internet (notice the capitalization of the “I”) is the infrastructure of wires and fiber optic cable that connects the entire world’s networks together. For example, at your home, you may have a dialup, DSL, cable, or satellite Internet connection. Let’s say you have dialup.

As you know, when you plug the phone line in your computer’s modem, you also must plug the other end into a phone jack on the wall. This phone jack on the wall then goes to the outside of your home to your phone provider’s box (usually screwed onto your house). From there, it moves up to a telephone pole, across the pole wires, and on to some office where it joins thousands of other wires in a phone network. DSL works the same way.

Your phone company, and a number of other companies, manage the network that joins all of these wires together. All of this is the Internet.

Continuing to use the example from above, the World Wide Web (WWW), is all of the computers (this includes computers and servers) that use the Internet to talk to each other. Therefore, when you log into your computer and open Internet Explorer, typing in http://www.google.com, you are accessing Google’s Web server, available to anyone who has access to the Internet.

When you type in Google’s address in your browser’s address line (as in the above paragraph), what you type in is the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) for that Web site. An URL is a Web address. You can download files from most servers (where you move a copy of a file that resides on another computer to your computer), or, in some cases, you can upload (where you move a copy of a file that resides on your computer to another computer) a file to another computer on the Internet.

As you probably are aware, clicking a link sometimes asks you if you want to save the file to your computer or just open it. If you choose to save it to your computer, it might take a while to do so. This is because the communications rules you are using are not really made to copy things quickly. The communication rules, also known as a protocol, is known as HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol). You can use a faster protocol to upload or download files to a computer (or server), but you have to know how to use it. The faster protocol is known as FTP (File Transfer Protocol). For small files, you won’t notice much speed difference.