CaptNemo looks at computer Networking
This
is my notes on how to set up a basic home network. I am by no
means an expert and am basing this on my own experiences. If in
doubt, ask your local networking guru :)
When I first
tried networking, I had a simple goal, connect two pc's so I
could play death match doom! I was able to do this easily
enough thanks to windows 95s new connection wizard that allowed
me to connect the two pc's using a serial cable and a device
called a null modem. Soon though this was not enough, the
connection was slow, and windows frequently had trouble
establishing the connection. I now had a third pc I wished to add
as well so the serial cable would no longer do the trick. I was
working with a very limited budget though and a hub was still
more money then I wanted to invest in my little network. I was
able to get some 10baseT network cards though and connect them
with thin coaxial cable. This has the advantage of being run in a
long chain so a hub is not needed. Both ends have to be
terminated though with a 50ohm resistor cap.
For this simple three pc
network I was originally using the ipx protocol because that was
the protocol supported by most of the network games I had (doom,
warcraft, warcraft2, descent) Eventually I ran into games that
required TCP/IP and I had to add that to my network. Fortunately
it was fairly easy to do in windows and Linux which I had begun
to experiment with supports TCP/IP by default. I did not have a
dedicated server though so I had to assign each pc an IP address
manually. This is referred to as 'static'
addressing.
There are three ranges of ip ddresses reserved for private networks:
10.0.0.01 – 10.255.255.255,
172.16.0.0 - 172.16.255.255 and 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255 ,
I was not aware of this and entered other addresses entirely
which functioned perfectly well but I had to change later when I
connected my network to the internet.
Now I was transferring files across the network and sharing a printer as well as playing games so I decided to setup a dedicated network server. I had played around with slackware, debian and other versions of Linux but for my server I used red hat simply because the cd was easy to get a hold of and the installation was fairly simple.
Many
networks were being switched from 10mbs to 100mbs and so I was
able to purchase 10mbs hubs very inexpensivley and began
switching my network over from coaxial cable to cat5 cable.
About
this time I also started to look into sharing my internet
connection. I knew that Linux was capable of doing this fairly
easily but alas my attempts to get my modem to work in Linux had
not succeeded so I looked for a solution that would work in
windows 95. I found that sygate made a program to do just that
and unlike other products for windows that used a proxy server
and involved setting static ip addreses on every machine, sygates
program acted as a DHCP server which assigned IP addresses
automatically to my other PCs. This worked great while I was
using a dial-up connection to the internet, and even though
windows now has connection sharing built in
I feel that it's
not very secure, so a program like sygate is a better solution.
It
wasn't long before I wanted a faster internet connection and
signed up for a broadband cable connection. This means that
instead of using my phone line to get online, my internet
connection comes in through my cable tv cable. You need to sign
up for service with your cable provider and install a 'cable
modem' which is not a true modem in the sense that a phone modem
is, but for pratical purposes provides a similar service- taking
the incoming signal and turning it into something you can use.
Most cable modems provide a USB connection you can plug directly
into a PC and an ethernet connection. I chose to use the
ethernet connection and connected it to a linksys router. These
small devices are now available inexpensivly and provide for
sharing your internet connection. They also provide a small
amount of additional security by helping to hide your PCs from
the internet. They use NAT to take your single IP address from
your ISP and to share it amongst your internal PC's. I had to
shut down sygate on my windows PC because the linksys router
provides DHCP services as well.
Whats next for my network? Well I've added several different
routers based on simplified linux installations, e-smith and
freesco are two of the easiest to install and boot right off a
floppy so you don't even need a hard drive in the computer to
use them. They add a level of firewall protection that the
linksys router cannot provide. I've considered upgrading my
10mbs hubs to 100mbs switches as not only is 100mbs faster but
switches provide for much faster connections then hubs. However
with wireless conections becoming faster and cheaper all the
time I will probably add wireless connections to my network
next.