File System and Peripheral Sharing

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# 3. File System and Peripheral Sharing

Office automation installations are typically concerned with sharing disk, printer and modem resources among computers on a local area network. In this case, an additional protocol level is required on top of the IPC protocol chosen. Many UNIX platforms implement file system sharing through a service known as NFS (Network File System), which is implemented using TCP/IP. This is not a very quick protocol, and can present some additional maintenance issues that are not present with other protocols. QNX implements NFS with its TCP/IP suite. Within a QNX network, the native QNX networking facilities offer seamless file, modem, printer and other device sharing at unparalleled speeds. Unfortunately, this protocol is not implemented outside of QNX.

MS-Windows implements file and peripheral sharing using the SMB protocol, which is layered on top of a lower-level IPC protocol. This lower level can generally be one of NetBIOS, IPX/SPX, or TCP/IP. Again, the QNX and MS-Windows computers must agree on the underlying protocol, and then implement the necessary SMB services. There are currently several ways to achieve SMB connectivity between QNX and MS-Windows:

1. Have QNX implement the NetBIOS or IPX/SPX protocol and run the SMB server and client applications on QNX. No MS-Windows program is required. This functionality is available in QNX using NetBIOS from third-party vendors.

2. Have MS-Windows use TCP/IP as its underlying communication protocol, and run the SMB server and client applications on QNX. No MS-Windows program is required, but the configuration of the MS-Windows network may need to be changed to use TCP/IP. Windows 95, Windows NT and Windows 3.11 can use more than one protocol simultaneously. This functionality is freely available in QNX using SMBFsys to share the MS-Windows machine's resources with QNX, and using Samba to share the QNX machine's resources with MS-Windows. SMBFsys ships with QNX 4.23. Samba is available from ftp://quics.qnx.com.

3. Implement the QNX standard communication protocol in MS-Windows, and perform file system and peripheral sharing using that protocol. This mechanism requires programs to be run in MS-Windows to implement the QNX protocol and other programs to be run in MS-Windows to perform the network interaction. This solution is available from third parties in QNX.

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