Wired v Wireless

A big decision when it comes to designing your network. A wired network is faster but means you need to run a cable to each computer that will be part of the network so this could involve drilling walls, lifting floorboards and crawling about in the loft!

A wireless network is slower than the wired equivalent, can, in some circumstances, be affected by interference from other equipment in your house (e.g. cordless phones, microwave ovens) and more effort is required to make it secure from the ‘prying eyes’ (well prying computers really) of others. The big advantage is that no cables are required (so with a laptop you can roam around the house or even the garden) and installation is relatively simple.   My network is a mix of the two, my main desktop PC is hard wired to the network but I also have both a laptop and a second desktop connected to the network via wireless.

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Connecting to the Internet

Before you go ahead with buying your network kit, consider how you expect each PC will be connected to the Internet...

Dial-up modem

If you are using dial-up, you could either have a modem in each computer but only one computer could be connected at any time or use a single modem and enable Internet Connection Sharing so that all computers on the network use the one modem. The downside of this is that two or more computers sharing a dial-up modem would be very slow and the computer with the modem installed would be acting as a server, passing data onto the other computers, thereby affecting it’s performance.

Cable

If you access the Internet via a cable modem (NTL, Telewest etc in the UK) you need the right hardware to connect to your set top box and your router would need to be located close by.

ADSL

If you use ADSL Broadband (e.g. BT, Wannadoo, Tiscali etc. in the UK), you probably connect via a DSL modem plugged into a USB port. You now have two choices, either the Internet Connection Sharing route which will slow down the PC connected to the modem as it passes data from the modem onto the network or buy a router that includes a DSL modem. This is the better option but be aware that if you replace the modem supplied by your ISP, they are unlikely to provide technical support in helping to get the new modem working. My ISP Tiscali, include a generic set of router/DSL modem settings in the help section of their site but will not provide technical support via phone.

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Network Terminology

To get to grips with networking, you have to wade through a whole swamp of jargon so I’ll try and present this in a logical order, ‘what you need to know in the order you need to know it’.

Workgroup

Part of the set-up in MS Windows is to create a Workgroup and then give each PC that is part of that network a ‘name’ so that they can be recognised and to facilitate sharing of resources, e.g. sharing a printer.

Hub

A distribution point for a wired network, the cables from each computer are connected together by the hub rather than directly from one computer to the next (known as a peer-to-peer connection).

Router

Does exactly what it says, it routes data traffic both to and from locations on the network so a router actually controls which data goes where, so each computer on the network gets the ‘right’ data.

IP Address

This is another level of detail beyond workgroup computer name. Each computer on a network has an IP Address, so if you connect your computer to your ISP via either a dial-up connection or broadband, you are connecting to their network and your computer is given an IP address. This usually happens ‘dynamically’ so each time you connect to your ISP, you are given a different IP address. The format is usually something like 255.255.0.4 but obviously the actual numbers vary. Within your home network however, the IP addresses fill be fixed or ‘static’ and part of the set-up/configuration will be to give each computer on your network an IP address so the router knows where the data is coming from/going to. The router also has it’s own IP Address so that it can act as a bridge between the IP Address allocated by your ISP and the range of IP Addresses used by your network. It’s worth mentioning here that you need to get used to the idea that it is the router that connects to the Internet and not your computer, your computer is now a device connected to the network.

Firewall

You can get a software firewall to install on your PC but for a network, you really should also consider using a hardware firewall between your modem and your router. A hardware firewall will prevent any unauthorised access to your network from the ‘outside’ and as such, is a must. You can also use a firewall to make access to sites impossible, so if you have children and you want to block specific sites, you can set this up in the router so that they will never be able to access the sites you name and since access to the router set up is via username and password, they should not be able to work around this.

Wireless Access Point

This is the hardware that connects any wireless kit you have to the main network. A Wireless Access Point (WAP) will have an aerial so it can send & receive signals from the computers that will be linked in this way but it will be itself connected in some way to the network, either by USB into a computer or by a network connection into a hub.

802.11b/g

This is jargon that you will regularly see when wireless networking is being discussed. It refers to a common standard amongst manufacturers to ensure compatibility between all wireless networking kit. 802.11 is the standard and that standard has been revised several times as the speed of data transfer has increased. The two most common are 802.11b and the newer 802.11g. Equipment using either of these two versions of the standard can be mixed together but overall the equipment using the older, slower standard will limit the ‘speed’ of data transfer across the network.

Wireless Encryption Protocol (WEP)

Using a wireless network means that you will be broadcasting your data via radio waves. This means that anyone else within a 100m radius that has a computer with wireless networking kit, also has the ability to ‘borrow’ your internet connection and download at will, or, if you don’t take steps to prevent it, look at your data on your hard drive.

To be blunt, if you don’t take steps to prevent this, someone could download something illegal via your Internet account and it would only be traceable to you, so guess who’d get the blame (or worse)?

There are two ways of preventing this;

• Set up your Wireless Access Point so that only named computers can use it (done via you naming the ‘acceptable’ IP Addresses as part of the set-up). This then prevents others from hijacking and using your Internet connection or browsing your hard drive.

• Enable Wireless Encryption Protocol (WEP). You have to enter a series of encryption keys (long sequences of 2 digit hexadecimal numbers) into all the computers that you want to have access to your Wireless Access Point. If a computer does not have the encryption keys, if the user tried to access the data, it would just be a meaningless jumble of unintelligible data.
  

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Workgroup & Computer Name

The first thing you need to do is give each computer to be connected to your network a name and to give them all a workgroup. This is easy to do in both Windows XP Home Edition and Windows ME, if you are using a different Operating System, you need to find this out for yourself.

My workgroup is called homenet, my PC is called Nikon, the laptop is called Canon and my son’s desktop PC is called Leica.Each computer has a ‘shared folder’ that is accessible from the other two computers, allowing files to be transferred between the three as required.

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My Network

After some research and trawling though magazines and web sites, I bought a Netgear unit that has a 4-port hub, wireless access point, hardware firewall dsl modem and a router all in one box. This certainly simplified things when it came to installation and configuration.
 Alternatively, you can buy a separate hub, router, modem and a wireless access point (if required) and connect them all together.
The dsl modem/firewall/router/hub/WAP box sits on my desk with the desktop PC connected via a cable to the hub (i.e. a wired network).

I also bought a wireless PCMCIA card for the laptop (again Netgear) and picked up a cheap wireless PCI card for my son’s desktop via e-bay. The wireless part of this network is to the older (slower) 802.11b standard but I worked out that since the Broadband connection was 512 Kb/sec (512 thousand bits per second) and 802.11b transfers data at 11Mb/sec (11 million bits per second), this would be fast enough.  The laptop and my son’s desktop connect via their respective wireless cards to the WAP. The WAP is configured to only allow named PC’s use it (via IP Address) and 128 bit WEP is also enabled. To configure all this, you log into the DSL modem/firewall/router/hub/WAP box via your web browser by entering the IP address of the unit, and then entering the username and password supplied by the manufacturer (Note, change the username and password a.s.a.p. so that no one else can mess with your settings).

Once logged on, you can set up all the elements you need. I tackled these tasks in the following order:

Set up the wired connection to desktop PC
Set up router so that it could connect to the Internet
Set up WAP to work with one wireless connection
Enable Wireless Encryption on the WAP and the computer connected via wireless
Repeat the last two steps for the second computer connected via wireless.

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Software Firewalls

I also use a software firewall (Zone Alarm) installed on all of my computers and making these work with the network these caused me more problems than the actual networking kit.
I would strongly advise that you shut down/disable any software firewalls until you have all the new hardware installed and working and then make sure that the software firewall knows that Internet access will be via a local network in future.
I also needed to add the IP address of the other two computers to the ‘trusted zone’ of the software firewall of each computer before I was able to share files and printers.

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Firmware Updates

Firmware is the software within the modem/router and is what controls how that all works. Firmware can be upgraded and you should periodically check the web site of the kit manufacturer to see if a firmware update is available.

When I first installed this kit, it suffered from interference from other devices in the house and occasionally had problems logging on to my ISP. I found out that a firmware update was available and when installed, both problems have been completely cured.

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If you still have a Dial-up Modem Installed

If you want to leave your dial-up modem installed as a back-up means of connecting to the Internet, you need to set up Windows so that it only uses the dial up modem if it cannot detect the network connection. I had problems with this and eventually gave up and disabled the dial-up modem via Device Manager and deleted the dial up profile details so Windows only ever looks for the network connection.

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