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Styx

04-10-2002, 05:52 PM

Home Networking

With computers getting cheaper and cheaper these days, it is not uncommon for a household to have more than one PC. If that describes you, then you have probably found yourself in the situation where you wished you could access the other PC to retrieve a file, use the printer attached to the other PC, share the modem on the other PC, or play multi-player computer games.

The easy solution to these problems are a home network where you connect two or more PCs to accomplish above mentioned tasks. If you think this requires a third computer that acts as a server, complicated installation, etc. think again. Regular home/desktop PCs running Windows 95 or 98 can be easily networked using what is called a peer-to-peer network. You can get the necessary parts for around $100, the installation takes around an hour or more depending how much cable you have to put in your house. Configuring each PC should take around 10 minutes.

What you need:

A network interface card (NIC) for each PC on the network.
When you go shopping for the network cards, you will notice that you can get either a 10Mbps or a 10/100Mbps card. This refers to the speed of how fast the card can physically transfer the data. Since 10/100Mbps cards are very popular and cost pretty much the same, you should go for one of those.

A hub to physically connect the PCs
Hubs come in different sizes, the main difference being the number of PCs that can be plugged into the hub. If you have two or three PCs and don't foresee another PC joining your family anytime soon, you should get a 4 port hub. If you have more PCs or plan to add more soon, you might want to consider a 8 port hub. If you foresee heavier traffic on your home network, e.g. multiplayer gaming, then you might want to consider a cheap switch instead.

Lots of cable
The cable most commonly used for networking is referred to as Cat 5 cable. Every decent computer store will sell you as much Cat 5 cable as you need by the foot. The cable should have a RJ-45 connector on each end, which looks like a phone jack just a little wider. Be sure to get plenty of cable, it is very easy to underestimate the length you need. Make sure the cable is "straight through" if you are connecting a PC to a hub or switch. "Cross over" cables are used to connect two computers together without having a hub or switch between them. If you want to run your LAN at 100 mbps then you should look into getting Cat 5 shielded cable to reduce errors induced by stray magnetic fields and cross talk in the wires.

Hardware Installation

First, install a network card in each one of the PCs following the instructions that came with the NIC. When you turn on the PC after installing the card, Windows should recognize the card and prompt you for the correct driver. Once it is installed, you should see a Network Neighborhood icon on your desktop. We need that icon to configure the network in a while.

Now you need to think about where the PCs are located in your house and what's the best way to run the cable. It involves a little more work if the PCs are not in the same or adjacent rooms. With adjacent rooms, you can probably just drill a hole in the wall to feed the cable through. In order to avoid serious injury inflicted by your spouse or landlord, please do not drill the hole in eye-height in the middle of the wall. Find an inconspicuous spot right over the base board, in a corner or in a closet. You might even be able to run the cable underneath the house or through the attic. Again, make sure that you have enough Cat 5 cable. Designate a central spot where to put the hub. Then run the cable from each PC to the hub.

Make sure that all the cables are securely plugged into a network card in a PC on one end and into the hub on the other end. The hub should also be plugged into an outlet as it needs power.

Note for Cable modem/DSL users

To access your cable modem after setting up your home network, plug your cable/DSL modem into the uplink port of your hub to make it available on your local network. To be able to access the cable/DSL modem from all PCs, you either need to install and configure proxy software, or get an individual IP address for each PC on the network from your ISP.

More information about Internet connection sharing can be found in our tutorial at http://www.pcnineoneone.com/howto/ics1.html

That should be all the physical work involved. Now you need to configure each PC.

Software Configuration

The last step is to configure each PC to see and be seen on the network. You should now see a Network Neighborhood icon on the desktop of each PC. Right-click that icon, select Properties. This will bring up the Network Properties dialog box with the Configuration tab selected. Here you need to install network protocols which enable the PCs to exchange data using a "common language."

Click the Add button, select Protocol, click Add, select Microsoft, highlight TCP/IP and click OK until you're back to the Network Properties dialog box. Don't close this box until after the very last step.

Now click the Add button again, select service, click Add, select File and Printer sharing for Microsoft Networks and click OK until you're back to the Network Properties box.

To be able for the PCs to identify each other on the network, each one needs an IP address. This is the PCs unique ID number that makes it positively identifiable. For your home network, you should use a specific range of IP addresses that are reserved for exactly this purpose, setting up local area networks. The number is 192.168.0.x with X being a number unique to each PC.

Highlight the TCP/IP entry and click Properties. If you see multiple TCP/IP entries, be sure to select the one for the network card, not the one for your Dial-up adapter. Go to the IP Address tab, select Specify an IP Address and enter 192.168.0.1 for the first PC, 192.168.0.2 for the second PC etc. Be sure not to use 192.168.0.0 because it is the network number, and not to use 192.168.0.255 because that address is reserved for broadcast traffic. The subnet number should be 255.255.255.0 on all PCs. Now you can close the TCP/IP Properties window since that's all we have to do here. If you were creating a bigger network with more PCs and access to the Internet etc., more things need to be set up here but to keep it simple and in the home network range we won't worry about that part.

Note for cable/DSL modem users

If you have a cable/DSL modem, the instructions above might not make quite as much sense as you will discover that on your main PC, you already have a network card and a TCP/IP protocol installed which is configured as instructed by your ISP. Don't change those settings. Instead, read on.

To be able to use your cable/DSL modem from all machines on the network, you have two alternatives:

Get additional IP addresses from your ISP for each PC on the network, so that each machine can access the Internet individually. This solution might cost a few extra dollars per month for each additional IP, but is very easy to set up and configure. If you do this, don't use the IP addresses and subnet mask mentioned in the previous paragraph, use the ones provided by your ISP instead.

Or

Use proxy software to share one IP address from your main PC with the other machines on the network. This is cheaper, but a little trickier to set up because you need to install and configure the proxy program and tell all applications to use this proxy. In this case, you would actually install a second network card into the main PC that already has one network card for the cable/DSL modem. The first network card remains configured the way it is, the second network card would connect the main PC to your hub and therefore your local network with the other PCs. This second network card needs to be configured with a local IP address as described above.

More information about Internet connection sharing can be found in our tutorial at http://www.pcnineoneone.com/howto/ics1.html

Now go to the Identification tab. Here you want to enter a unique name for each PC, the choice of name is up to you. Name them after the 3 stooges, the seven dwarfs, your favorite baseball players, whatever. Then enter a workgroup name. This one needs to be the same on each PC. If you can't think of one, use the word Network, or Workgroup, or Home.

Now you can close the Network Properties box. But first insert your Windows CD into the CD drive because Windows needs to copy several files. As soon as that's done, Window will prompt you to reboot the PC which you need to do for the new settings to take effect.

In order to see other PCs on the network and access the drives on the other PCs, you first need to enable File Sharing, which is simple. In the Explorer, right-click on the drives you want to share on the network, select Sharing, click Shared As, and specify the access type: Read-only, Full (read and write), or Depends on password. If you have a closed network meaning that this network is not connected to the outside world, and you have no sensitive data on your drives that not all user should be able to access, you can just set the access to full without a password. But if this network is somehow connected to the outside world via dial-up, cable, or DSL modem, you need to use password protection for sharing, as well as use a hardware or software based firewall solution. To share printers, you need to enable sharing as well. Go to Start/Settings/Printers, right-click the printer(s) to be shared and select Sharing.

After configuring each PC and performing the necessary reboot, you should reboot each PC again after each one has been configured. Then launch the Windows Explorer on each PC and check out the Network Neighborhood icon at the bottom. If everything went right, you should now see underneath Network Neighborhood an icon for the Entire Network and then the name of each PC on your network. If you open the Entire Network, you should see the name of your workgroup which contains again all PCs on the network.

That's it. You're done. Now you can share files and printers over your new home network.
http://www.pcnineoneone.com for more tutorials

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