Sams Teach Yourself Network Troubleshooting in 24 Hours, Second Edition

File and Print Services and Authentication

We’re going to talk about file and print services before we talk about authentication, merely to acknowledge that it exists. We won’t get heavily into it because it’s pretty simple, and typical problems don’t actually have much to do with the file and print services themselves. Problems getting to files and printers are usually related to protocol problems, name service problems, WINS problems, DNS problems, and authentication problems.

As Figure 12.1 shows, once service location and name resolution is finished, authentication is done, Windows file-sharing and print-sharing happens through a mechanism called server message block, or SMB. SMB exists in all versions of Windows, with some modifications ...