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6. Network Operating system

These days it is quite common to have your personal computer attached to a network of some kind.

For example, most of the computers in school will be networked. Most of the computers in companies will also be networked, and even at home you may have two or more computers networked together so they can share the internet connection.

All these machines need to have an operating system that can deal with the network.

Examples of a network operating system include Windows Vista, Windows 8 and Mac OS X and of course all the mainframe operating systems.

A network operating system has to have the following features

• Deal with users logging on.
• Maintain the network connection to the server(s)
• Expand the file system to view folders on other computers
• Provide security to separate user accounts from each other.

When the user logs on, they will provide an username and password. This has to be checked by the operating system contacting either a local database or perhaps central database on a networked secure server.

With a network operating system, you can view folders on other computers, sometimes called 'shares'. They are given a letter, W: perhaps, and as far as you are concerned they are simply an extension of your local hard disk as you can read and write to the folders as if they are on your own machine (as long as the admin has set up your file permissions to at least Read /Write)

There may be many users making use of the same machine, so the operating system will create 'user folders' on the local hard disk to store their particular settings and application set-ups (not their files or documents). So when an user logs on to the computer, the operating system will read the settings from the correct username folder and set up the desktop to look just how they last left it along with all the settings or defaults they chose for various applications.