> >If you're using XP home as a peer to peer network, > >then only 5 total users may be attached to your > >computer. That is yourself and 4 others. > > > >With XP Pro you're allowed 10 users to be attached.
> What do you mean by "attached"? This would be defined by Microsoft. Each time you connect to a computer for file sharing, you 'attach' to it, and it creates a connection. These connections time-out after a while, and it's possible for the client or server computer to explicitly terminate the connection by using admin tools. In practice, though, this 'attached' number is higher than the computers truely transfering files or browsing files on the 'server' computer... There's also an MS known, MS acknowledged, and MS ignored issue with Windows computers used as P2P SMB 'servers'-- when a client first boots up and connects, it creates it's regular connection, as well as a 'null session' that counts towards the limit. This means if you have a turnkey system such as ours, where the stations all start at the same time, you're effectively limited to 5 stations(half the connection limit) unless the client code has error-handling to wait for the null sessions to disconnect(they timeout in 30-60 seconds, IIRC). Now, in Windows XP, there's another "10 connection limit" that can be somewhat confusing. You may have seen it in your Event Log, and even seen some network 'quirks' about the time of the event log entry. This is a 10 half-open tcp/ip connection limit. This was a 'security fix' that Microsoft implemented to try to slow worm propogation(albiet not very effective; if you do the math, you can still propogate to millions of computers in just a few minutes). If you try to load any P2P programs, such as bit torrent, you're likely to see this problem. Microsoft has no registry hack to fix this 'fix' for those who actually need their network connections to not shut down/throttle like this, but there's a small utility out there that will patch the tcpip.sys file to change the limit. I'm usually leary of this sort of hack, but I've been really annoyed by this limit and was forced to try the utility and hack my tcpip.sys, which actually works quite well. It's simply setting the functionality effectively to what it was in prior versions of Windows... The utility is available at http://www.lvllord.de/ for anyone interested in fixing their Windows XP computers.... -- Derek _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
