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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You shouldn’t have to worry too much about compatibility: one of the great things about Ethernet and wireless networking standards is that they genuinely are standards for the most part. So you can bring a Windows laptop with a Linksys 802.11b card onto an Apple AirPort Extreme network and it will still work; equally, take your AirPort Extreme-equipped iBook G4 onto an 802.11b or 802.11g network and it will work fine, too. And a little, closely guarded secret is that some of these routers have features that are better implemented or just not available on an Apple base station, such as MAC address cloning (see Boxout One) or DMZ configuration, which is less than excellent in Apple’s base station.
As your ambitions get bigger though, be aware that the cost savings you made at the beginning might come back to haunt you. Often, that cheapo ADSL router with 16 ports and built-in 802.11g base station that you found in the bargain bin at PC World will collapse under the weight of a heavy network load – in other words, as soon as you start any P2P software such as Bittorrent. Evaluate at the beginning what you think you’re going to be using your network for: if all you’re going to be doing is sending emails, browsing the web and playing each others’ iTunes, that bargain-bin trinket might have been a good find; on the other hand, if you’re planning on blasting gigabytes of Hollywood movies up and down your Internet connection while simultaneously burning a DVD across your home network using Toast Titanium, you almost certainly made a false economy at the outset. If you’re going to be in the latter camp, consider breaking down your requirements into parts and buying “best of breed” hardware for each requirement; instead of that all-in-one job, get yourself a really good ADSL router with perhaps only one Ethernet port which you connect to a 16-port Ethernet switch to keep your home traffic zipping around nicely – connect that in turn to an AirPort Extreme Base Station to share your printer and provide wireless access. You’ll find the performance and stability worth the effort, even if it does push costs up; you also run the risk of a brain haemorrhage, since outside the Apple world, it’s a sad fact that the better a product is, the harder it is to work out how to configure it.
If your network is robust enough (and your ISP’s terms and conditions allow it), your ambitions for your simple Mac may expand once you’ve had some experience of using it. Take a good look at the Sharing preferences panel again. Before you know it, you could be running your own FTP server and your own web server; and although it’s not in the list, your Mac has a mail server built in that you can have up and running in relatively little time. When you’re out and about, you can log in over a secure connection and get your Mac to do all sorts of crazy things – even connect to other computers on the network.
A home network can be a very simple thing to set up and produces far more benefits than are immediately obvious; as you grow it, you may find all sorts of things to do with it that you’d never thought of before. That means it has a lot in common with Macs.
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