Idiots’ guide to networking

• Article 3 of 53
• iCreate, May 2004
• View a PDF of the original article ~ 504K

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Networking is one of those words with a double meaning. To people with names like Jonnty and Torquil, it’s another way of saying “a trip to the pub”. But for the Mac world, it’s getting two computers to talk to each other.

Why would anyone outside an office want to network computers their computers together? Well, it might be for something simple like sharing pictures from a digital camera or listening to songs from someone else’s music library. Perhaps you’d like to avoid having to constantly plug and unplug modems and printers every time someone else wants to use the Internet or print a document? Maybe you’re bored of waiting for little junior to finish annihilating 15-year-old online gamers from Korea in Unreal Tournament before you can get your email? Or is the simple reassurance that you can back up your files onto another machine before you take your laptop out on the road enough to make you look closely at the advantages of a home network.

Setting up home networks used to be the preserve, in many people’s eyes, of real-ale drinkers, professional beard-growers and those who can name every Star Trek episode in both chronological and alphabetical order. Indeed, it was practically impossible under Mac OS 9 to have an Internet connection and connect to a network at the same time without extra hardware. Fortunately, OS X has made it as easy as a button click to do almost everything networking-related so settle back as we show you how to save time, money and frustration by simple home networking.

The simplest network of all is between two computers that have no Internet access. Typically, you might get this kind of set up when two people with laptops meet and want to exchange pictures, documents and other files. Fortunately, it’s as easy to set up with a Mac as describe. All you need to do to set up a network between the two computers is to buy yourself an “Ethernet” cable: it’ll cost between £5 and £10 if you shop around and you can even get them from Dixons; make sure they’re “CAT 5” quality though. Then plug the cable into the Ethernet ports of both computers – those are the ones with “<…>” written next to them.

And that should be it, in theory. Provided you have library sharing and browsing switched on in iTunes and iPhoto, your computers should now be able to see each others’ music and photos and let you access them. If you want to share more than that, you can go to the Sharing preference panel in Systems Preferences and click on Personal File Sharing. Then anyone can access the Public folder in your Home directory (or anyone else’s Home directory) and copy files from it; if they want to, they can upload files into the Drop Box in the Public folder.

Of course, that is just the theory. A couple of things can cause you problems. Firstly, older Macs do not have “auto sensing” Ethernet ports and so you’ll need a special kind of Ethernet cable called a “crossover” cable to connect them. Similarly, PCs rarely have auto-sensing ports. You’ll also need to do a few more things (see Walkthrough 2) to share your files with Windows users, although iTunes for Windows can see iTunes for Mac libraries without any fiddling. Lastly, OS 9 users will make your life difficult: they’ll need to ensure that both AppleTalk and TCP/IP are configured to use their Built-In Ethernet card, and you’ll need to enable AppleTalk over your Ethernet connection using the Network system preferences (although OS X 10.3.3 does that by default now).

Using AirPort or AirPort Extreme is equally easy if your Macs have the appropriate cards installed (see Boxout Two). It is even easier if you want to connect more than two Macs together, since most Macs only have one Ethernet port and therefore can only fit in one cable; yet any number of Macs can connect together wirelessly.

Ethernet connections are faster than wireless connections, however, so bearing with it can be worth the effort. To connect more than two Macs together, you’ll need an Ethernet “hub” or “switch” that you can connect all your cables to. It will then merrily pass all the traffic around between the Macs so they all remain in contact with one another. Hubs generally come with 4, 8, 16 and 32 ports (with one extra, sometimes, to connect them to other hubs) and can cost as little as £20, so they’re still cheaper than equipping a group of Macs that don’t have AirPort/AirPort Extreme cards.

The next step beyond this closed network is opening up Internet access and sharing it with the computers on the network. Unfortunately, this is where you have to start planning a bit. How many computers are going to have access to the Internet? Is my dial-up connection going to provide enough bandwidth for three computers? Do I want to have one computer share its connection or get a piece of dedicated hardware instead?

Mac OS X makes it very easy to share an Internet connection. Go into the Sharing preference panel in Systems Preferences, click on the tab marked Internet, then decide which connection you’re going to share. It’s no use sharing your Ethernet connection over your Internal Modem connection, but the other way round will enable you to share a dial-up connection with an Ethernet-based home network, so pick correctly. Equally, if you set your Mac up as a software base station, you can share your dial-up Internet connection with a wireless home network, a far cheaper and more sensible alternative than the wacky idea of the AirPort Extreme Base Station that comes with a dial-up modem.

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.

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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