iles. Two file sharing methods are discussed here as examples: 1. Microsoft file sharing Common internet file (CIF) system is the native file-sharing protocol of Windows 2000 and XP that was developed by Microsoft. Due to NTLM encryption, CIF is more secure than FTP and generally faster and is used for providing the network drive functionality and print sharing. The terms NETBIOS and NETBEUI are the more correct names for Microsoft file and print sharing. Windows file sharing is widely used in enterprises where employees share office resources like printer or a central repository for files. For intranet a cen- tral repository using network share would be better than FTP, which would be slower and less secure. For external sharing of files, FTP would be more suitable because of its interoperability and ease of deployment. 2. Netware file sharing Netware file sharing is one of the fastest file transfer protocols over internal net- works. It is nonroutable because they are built on top of the Internetworking packet exchange or Sequenced packet exchange (IPX/SPX) protocols. These packets can be converted to TCP/IP using translators. The performance fac- tor is lost in this case. The Netware system, also referred to as IntranetWare is centered on a central Netware server that runs the Novell operating system started from a bootstrap DOS application. The authentication and privileges can be controlled by Netware Directory Service or NDS, which is hosted by the server and can replicate among other servers. Instead of NDS the older Novell servers (3.x) use binary and the bindery cannot replicate. By using the Novell core protocol (NCP), the clients locate the server and when a remote file server is found, it is mapped to a local drive on the client's machine. 30.6 Implementation Four example programs are discussed in this section. The implementation of all the programs in this section is using the Perl programming language. 1. Read file: In this example, the contents of a file is read into a data structure and the data s