Complete guide to home networking
- Article 37 of 53
- iCreate, August 2005
Macs have always been the easiest computers to network, so isn't it time you got down with the digital hub and got your devices talking to each other? Rob Buckley shows you how to do it with and without cables
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Now you’ve taken stock of your computers’ networking capabilities, you can decide how to create your network. If all your Macs have wireless capabilities built in, happy days! That’s all you need. You can create a wireless network straight away and all the machines will be able to join it.
If you don’t, but you only have two Macs with Ethernet or FireWire, you can crack open the discount Lambrini anyway. FireWire cables come in at £10-15 but the average Ethernet cable now costs between £2 and £5, so you can have a very simple home network up and running for less than the cost of a single issue of iCreate. In both cases, just plug your cable into the corresponding ports in the backs or sides of your Macs and they’ll automatically create a network and configure themselves to use it.
Once you have that network up and running, you can use it to transfer files using the Personal File Sharing and Windows Sharing system in the Sharing pane of your System Preferences, run a web site, and share your iTunes and iPhotos. But there’s also a host of peripherals you can share once you’ve connected them to your Mac. Any printer can be used by other computers once you enable Printer Sharing in the Sharing pane. You can share your digital camera or webcam using Image Capture in your Applications folder. If you have Roxio’s Toast, you can share a CD or DVD burner with other Toast users. Download SharePoints (www.hornware.com) and you’ll be able to share files stored on external hard drives or your iPod.
This is where you have to start thinking. Will you be wanting to do any of these things? If you are, then although wireless networking is a great way of creating a simple network with the minimum of effort, wired networking is still a lot faster, more reliable and cheaper as you try to scale the whole thing up to include more devices. If you’re at all impatient or you’re ambitious but on a budget, start thinking wired from the outset. If you’re not, stick with wireless. Of course, you can also combine the two to have a partially wired network with certain Macs, such as laptops, connected wirelessly.
DOING IT WITH WIRES
As we said, wired networking is easy. Just bung the cable in and off you go. Unlike wireless networking however, you start having to buy in extra equipment as soon as you need to add a third computer or device to the network. After all, if you’ve only one place for the cable to go, how do you connect one computer to two others?
What you’ll need is a ‘hub’. A hub will sit at the centre of your network like the hub at the centre of a bike wheel with all the spokes radiating outwards. Its function is to connect lots of devices together over Ethernet, for which it has four or more Ethernet sockets and potentially a fifth to connect it to another hub.
Hubs are reasonably cheap, starting at just over £10 for a basic model. They become more expensive as you add in more sockets, with 16-socket hubs fairly common in smaller offices, although you can “daisy chain” hubs together up to a point.
Hubs also become more expensive as they gain in intelligence and capability. Regular hubs will throw network traffic around all over the place, but ‘switching’ hubs or switches will decide which traffic should go where before passing it on: this reduces the amount of data going around the place and speeds the whole network up.
There are other varieties of hubs, too. ‘Routing’ hubs or routers (also known as ‘bridges’) will also be able to connect two networks together and decide which traffic belongs on which network.
Which is where we come to the Internet. The Internet is just one big network. It uses the same method of communication that your home network will. So, lo and behold, if you want your Macs to be able to access the Internet as well as your home network, you’ll need a router. Now that router needn’t be a hub. Your Mac has it within itself to be a router, too, at just the touch of a button: ain’t that clever?
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