A rchive Date
[ 14-04-2001 ]
Category
[ Information Technologies ]
sub-Categoy
[ Networking ]
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[http://www.the-ctrl-alt-del.com/2001/Review/Daniel/Networking_Part1/Networking_Basics2.htm
Building your LAN
The next issue is deciding if you are going to share your connection by having the internet connection go straight into a computer of yours, or if you are going to use a router/firewall to accept your connection and then have the line go from there to your systems. This is a crucial decision and if you have the money the router is the way to go. There are some excellent reasons why using a dedicated router to share your connection is better than using one of your systems. The first is security. Most good routers (I recommend the Netgear RT314) come with some sort of packet filtering abilities that make your network safer when properly configured. It is a stretch to call these devices firewalls, but using these capabilities along with a software based firewall.
I recommend the following personal firewall:
(Note: I will do a separate article on Security soon.)
On each of your computers behind the router makes for decent security (when configured properly). The second reason for going with a dedicated router rather than using a computer is performance. Although some could argue that there isn’t much of a hit on a system just routing packets to and from the Internet, I for one would rather have my entire system at my disposal rather than having it performing other tasks at the same time. The third reason to use a router is reliability. When I first reformatted my machine after getting my router up I was completely thrilled when I remembered that I could still browse the web on my other box.
Basically, you can do whatever you want to your machines without messing will Internet connectivity because it is your router that is maintaining your connection for you. If your computer is the gateway to the Internet and your system crashes while your buddy is downloading a 650 MB cd image you are not going to be very popular. That being said, using your own system for the gateway is not that bad if you are not able to get a router for whatever reason, or if you know that you aren’t going to have more than one system to share the connection with.
Next there is the question of using a hub or not. Some say,” Why use a hub when I can just connect the two systems together with a cable and be done with it?” Well, for one, it isn’t as fast in many cases. You have to use a crossover cable to do that and it just isn’t as good in the speed and reliability area as using regular CAT 5 cable and a hub. The other consideration is that with a hub you can add more computers at a drop of a hat, as opposed to being restricted to only one system that can share the Internet. I am very much in favor of using a hub to network even just two computers. Hub prices are so low now that there isn’t much of a reason not to.
The other point that should be mentioned here is that when I say hub what I really mean is switch. A switch is essentially a superior hub because it can process multiple data streams at the same time and it ‘routes’ network traffic based on the destination MAC address. This way if you have three machines and computer 1 is talking to computer 3, computer 2 doesn’t have to deal with the traffic. In fact, computer 2 never even sees the packets unless they are broadcasts. So if you have the choice of buying a hub or a switch, go with the switch. They cost a bit more, but they are worth it.
Ok, let’s assume you have two windows machines and you have TCP/IP installed. There are a number of steps that have to be done to get your machines to see each other on the network, and not getting one of them will nearly always keep things from working right. First, make sure to set their IP’s to be good internal addresses in the same subnet. I would use 192.168.0.x. So, just for simplicity, use 192.168.0.10 for the first one and 192.168.0.20 for the second one, both will have a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. An explanation of subnet masks and TCP/IP is outside of the scope of this article, but you can find good info about the subject here. Next you have to make sure that both machines are in the same workgroup. This is done by right clicking My Computer and going to properties, then to the Identification tab. Name your workgroup anything cool that doesn’t have any weird characters in it and isn’t too long. Next, name your computers something meaningful.
These are the names that you are going to be using to communicate on your network. Once you are done there go ahead and ping around your network using IP addresses to make sure things are good to go. The next step is one that is not necessary but is a great tip and a crucial piece of any clean network. Open your start menu and do a search of your hard drive for ‘hosts’. You will find one file in the /drivers/etc directory called hosts.sam. Open it up with notepad and edit it to include the names of your computers and their IP addresses in the same format that is already there in the sample. (This requires that you assign static IP addresses to your client/host computers. You can still keep running DHCP even if you do this, so don’t worry about that) Save the file with no extension (removing the .sam).
You now have an active hosts file that is used for name resolution in conjunction with your DNS settings. You can ping your favorite sites and get their IP addys and then add their entries into the file and you will have lightning fast name resolution when you go to ask for those sites. More importantly though, you will now be able to ping the machines on your LAN by name rather than IP. Go ahead and ping around your network again, this time using the names you assigned.]
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