Dial-up networking in Windows 95/98 is still popular, perhaps for no other reason than
approximately 100 million clients worldwide have a Microsoft operating system installed.
From a client’s perspective, the cost and effort needed to connect to the office remotely requires
little more than a phone line and modem.
As you will see in this chapter, configuring and administering a single Windows workstation
for dial-up networking is very simple. Unfortunately, administering dial-up networking
for thousands of remote users is not as simple, and there are few existing tools that
make this task easier.
Microsoft Windows 95/98 supports remote dial-up networking with the protocols that provide
transport for NetBIOS:
NetBEUI
IPX
IP
Supporting these protocols is logical because of Windows networking’s historical dependency
upon the NetBIOS protocol and the name services that it provides. This changed in Windows 2000
and XP. It is possible to add other protocols with third-party transport, but most designers find
IP support to be sufficient, and they configure the client for PPP services.