Idiots’ guide to networking
- Article 3 of 53
- iCreate, May 2004
Find out how to get all of your Macs talking to each other in perfect harmony with our guide to networking Macs and Windows PCs, creating AirPort networks and wiring broadband to every room in your house. We'll show you what kit you need, how to connect it all and how to go wireless.
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There are drawbacks to this cut-price approach. First, your Mac has to be switched on whenever anyone wants to access the Internet. Second, sharing your connection can slow your Mac down; the more computers on your network wanting to access the Internet, the slower it will get.
A dedicated piece of equipment called a router gets you round this problem. What does a router do? It routes things. No big surprises there then. A more detailed explanation is that it redirects traffic intended for other networks. So if you have an Internet router, all your Internet traffic will travel off the home network onto the Internet and then back again, while all your home network traffic stays on the network.
What a router doesn’t do is create an Internet connection. Which would make it useless for anything except office networks if it didn’t usually come with a built-in modem of some variety. An ADSL router is typically a must-have for anyone with a home network and an ADSL broadband connection. Not only can it overcome the slowing down inherent to a computer sharing its Internet connection, it can also replace the USB modem usually provided by the Internet Service Provider (ISP). Most USB ADSL modems are as cheap as they are because they’ve been developed to make the computers to which they’re attached do most of the hard thinking. The result is that computers that use USB ADSL modems are typically slower when they’re online than when they’re not.
Getting rid of the USB modem is particularly good for Mac users. With a few notable exceptions, most of the modems available in the UK don’t have Mac drivers – or when they do, it’s inevitable that they’ll be for OS 9 if you use OS X and for OS X if you use OS 9. Routers, since they are usually configured using a web browser rather than a Windows program and since they don’t need drivers, are perfect for overcoming the well known problem of the ISP that doesn’t support Macs. It may feel like you’ve stuck two fingers up at their Windows-centricness, but you’ve still had to buy a new bit of hardware (although routers can cost £40 or so, so are relatively inexpensive) and you’re paying the ISP £20 or so a month, so it’s a pretty hollow victory, unfortunately. It would be better if ISPs just provided routers rather than USB modems in the first place.
A router is also important if you intend to use an AirPort Extreme Base Station in the UK. While Apple may be proudly proclaiming its base station as one of the easiest ways to get onto the Internet, the sad fact is this isn’t true. Why not? Well, despite its vaguely hippyish, “Think Different” image, inside Apple, the “if it’s good enough for America, it’s good enough for the rest of the world” approach to product development is still uppermost. It might as well have bald eagles circling its headquarters while a giant burger grill-up takes place outside its reception. Why else do you think iPhoto’s print ordering service has taken so long to get running, while Windows XP had built in support for Jessops’ UK service from the first day of its launch, back in 2001?
Further evidence is here: to get onto the Internet, most ISPs require you to provide an id and password to authenticate yourself. With a dial-up modem, you use a system called PPP to do this. In America, the most common way of authenticating yourself over a broadband connection is PPPoE – PPP over Ethernet. Unfortunately, most of Europe and the rest of the world with broadband connections use PPPoA – PPP over ATM (not ADSL, confusingly enough). And guess what? The AirPort Extreme Base Station, just like the AirPort Base Station before it, supports PPPoE but not PPPoA.
The situation is slightly less black and white than that, however. Some UK ADSL providers are moving to support PPPoE and most cable broadband providers already do or use the set-top boxes given to customers to do the hard work; but you shouldn’t think about buying a Base Station by itself until you know for sure whether your planned set-up will be compatible with your ISP’s technological requirements.
There are still plenty of reasons to buy an AirPort Base Station. They’re prettier than any other base station on the market. There’s a very easy, Mac-based configuration program installed on every OS X computer. Apple is consistently in the forefront of implementing new wireless standards and has already provided a free update that allows the AirPort Extreme Base Station to use WPA, the latest most secure encryption standard, making Apple the first vendor to implement it. They have USB ports for sharing printers wirelessly. And they employ WDS, the wireless distribution system, which allows you to extend the range and number of clients on your network using additional AirPort Extreme Base Stations.
If you buy yourself an ADSL router, you can plug your Base Station straight into it and you’ll be able to give broadband wireless access to all the computers on your network.
But it’s also worth looking around at non-Apple hardware. Companies such as NetGear and Belkin produce all-in-one ADSL routers that are also wireless base stations and which cost more or less the same as an Apple base station. Buy one of these, and it’ll probably be the only bit of hardware you’ll need for a home broadband wireless network. It might not look as nice, though, and the configuration will probably be a little bit harder.
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