HOME NETWORKING
    If you have more than one computer at home, building your own home network can be easy and fun, but it does require a little basic understanding of the concepts and hardware involved, if your network is going to work well. We will take a look at this first, along with a little understanding on how some basic Internet concepts fit in to it.

    WHAT IS A NETWORK?
    A network can be defined as 2 or more computers that can communicate with each other to share resources, like an Internet connection, data files, programs and printers. It can be just two computers directly connected together, or as massive as the Internet itself, which is really just a collection of Interconnected Networks.

    AUTOMATIC ADDRESSING
    Every computer on a network needs to have an address so the other computers know where to find it, just like a telephone line has a unique number. Similar to how your telephone company tells you what your phone number is, your Internet Provider tells you what your Internet Address (known as your Internet Protocol or IP Address) is. More accurately, their Server computers tell your home computer what it's address will be, though a process known as Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). An IP Address looks like this: 207.114.228.190. Always the same format of four groups of number, each between 0 and 255.

    INTERNET ADDRESSING
    IP Addresses work great, but it would get pretty difficult to remember a whole bunch of them when we are cruising around the Internet. Isn't YAHOO.COM a lot easier to remember than 206.109.112.135? For this reason, a system was developed to convert easily remembered names into numbers that computer like better. Its called the Dynamic Naming System or DNS. Simple in concept, whenever you ask to see a web page by typing in it's name (or URL - Uniform Resource Locator) your computer sends a request out to a DNS Server computer that asks "can you tell me where this site is?". If that DNS Server know's the IP Address of the site you are asking for, it sends it back, and your computer goes there. If it does not know, it just forwards the request on to other DNS servers - "can anybody help this guy out?" - until eventually one of them knows where your site is located and returns the address. Very much like when you know a persons name and look them up in the telephone book to find their phone number.

    Actually, the use of DNS is mostly transparent to the home user, and seldom comes into play when seting up a home network, but it can in certain situations, so we have included a little information on it here.

    The HARDWARE
    Setting up the simplest two PC home network requires only a little bit of hardware, a Network Card in each computer and a cable to connect them. But these days the most common sort of network ivolves 2 or more PC's and and an Internet Connection, so we will look at the hardware needed for that type of home network.

      Hubs. A network Hub usually has 4 or more ports to plug into, and are inexpensive, from $20 up. Very simple to connect, but also very limited, and not recommended. The nature of a hub is that anything that comes in on one port is transmitted out through all of the other ports. What if one of the other ports had your Internet connection plugged into it. When you try to send a file from one computer on your network to another, you are also sending it out over your Internt connection. Not very secure, but fine to use of you are not connecting to the Internet.

      Switches. A switch looks very similar to a hub, and costs only a little more. The difference is that a switch is able to figure out who is plugged into it, and direct the traffic to just that port. If the traffic is for the internet, it sends it out over your internet connection. If it is just for another PC on your network, it goes just to there. It "switches" from port to port, depending on the intended destination. Safer, but still not the best, as it cannot determine if the traffic coming in should be ALLOWED in or not.

      Routers. This is the BEST solution for home networks, for a number of reasons. A router has one port that will have your external connection from your Internet Service Provider (ISP) plugged into it, direct from your cable or ADSL modem. It will then have 4 or more ports for you internal network. I say "internal" because that is what a router does, it separates your external connection from your internal network. Your ISP provided automatic address STOPS when it reaches the router. The router then creates new IP Addresses for the internal network, and gives them out to the computers, the same way that your ISP hands out IP Addresses, using DHCP. With one VERY important difference. The addresses that it gives out are special addresses that are reserved for internal networks only, and all routers around the world are built to keep them internal only. They will almost always start with 192.168.x.x Usually the router's internal side address will be 192.168.0.1, with your internal computers going from 192.168.0.2 to 192.168.0.254. Most commonly, home routers will let you manually assign addresses from 2 to 100, and will use 101 to 254 for automatic (DHCP) addressing, although this does vary depending on brand name.

      The value in this is that the 192.168.x.x network is kept strictly internal only. Your router will convert it into the ISP provided address and allow it to leave the network over your Internet connection only if a specific request is made to do so. From the other side, any traffic that comes IN to the router from the Internet connection will only be allowed to make the jump over to the internal network if it hase been ASKED FOR. If you request to see a web page, or ask to see your new emails, download a file by FTP or other method. The point is that you are asking for it. This means that most pop-up ads are blocked, or hackers trying to get into your computer are blocked. This is what is known as a hardware firewall. For more details, please refer to the Security pages.

      Another benefit of using a router in this sort of setup is that all of your internal computers are sharing just one external internet address. ISP's will often tell you that you need an extra IP address (at extra cost) for a second computer. Not true in this sort of set up. At the usual price of $10 a month, the $40 to $80 that the router costs is quickly returned.

      Network Interface Cards
      Each computer connected to your network must have a Network Interface card installed. Most PC's come with them hese days, but if they did not, they can be purchased for as low as $10 or $15, and are easily installed. Remove the cover of your PC, plug in the card to an empty expansion slot, and put the cover back on. Windows will probably most likely autoconfigure the driver, or possibly ask you to put in a driver disk. Windows default setting is to request a DHCP assigned address, so it you have a router that will provide one, as most do, just plug in the cable and you are all set.

      Cables
      Network cables are known as Category 5 cables or just Cat 5 for short. A patch cable, also known as a straight cable, is what you need if you are connection to a router, switch or hub. Should you be connecting directly from one computer to another, you would need a crossover cable.

    SETTING IT ALL UP

    Your home network will look very much like this:

    Plugged in like this, using all regular straight cables, your network should connect and work, with little or no other software configuration need. If you are having difficutly, please contact Bitstar with some details and we can guide you through it.

    This covers the physical part of a Home Network. Next we will take a look at some basics of Resource Sharing, in other words, getting your networked computers to talk to each other cooperatively.