Re: Mr. Flashlight

[flash@xxxxxxxx]

Harry,

Mapped drives are the way to go, or permanent-link icons as you suggest--use the following format:
\x.x.x.xdirectory where x is the IP adress of the destination station. Alternatively,
\BIOSnamedirectory also works.

Mr. Flashlight consumes network resources. Not much of a problem when you have only 3 machines in a
home LAN, but a nightmare in a corporate LAN with several hundred or thousand stations. The icons
you see for 'computers near me' in the MS network neighborhood is not what you might expect. You are
not actually seeing computers near you. What you are seeing is a list of currently available
computers (or other network resources, such as shared printers) which have 'registered' with the
Master Browser. When you open the MS network neighborhood and Mr. Flashlight comes on, your machine
is sending a request for the current list to the Master Broswer; if Mr. Flashlight takes a while,
it's because the MB is busy. The MB also sends periodic updates, every 13 minutes if memory serves
me.

Which machine gets to be MB is decided by pecking order upon booting: newest OS first (Vista before
XP before w2k before NT etc. etc.) If 2 of the same OS come online, then highest service pack
number. If 2 of the same SP, then chronological order.

Mapped drives or permantnt-link icons with \IPaddressdirectory undercut all that chit-chat.




-----Original Message-----
From: Harry Binswanger 
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2007 11:28:18 -0500
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Answer found re failure of NET USE LPT1 to redirect LPT1

>Flash wrote:
>
>
>>This the way the GUI calls the MS proprietary networking protocol, called
>>SMB (server message block), which runs on top of NetBIOS as a transport
>>protocol (which MS took over from IBM in the last mellennium).
>>
>>Even without SMB (client for MS networks), you can still run TCP/IP and go
>>surfing on the Internet, and use other applications such as FTP for file
>>transfer, emails, etc. Deactivating it deactivates only the MS proprietary
>>functions.
>
>Interesting. The flashlight search works . . . about half the time. So
>maybe I should deactivate it, and just use permanent icons for the (two)
>LAN locations I go to.
>
>Thanks.
>
>Harry Binswanger
>hb@xxxxxxxx
>
>
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