How to set up home network?

[Aspirin]

We have recently switched completely to Mac, I use a Mac Pro, the 3 kids and wife have iMacs, so total of 5 computers in the house.

What would be the best way to network them together? I would like to make it easy to share files, music, pictures and the kids want to multi-play games together.

We have a wireless network and wireless printer.

I have for my work Mac Pro a backup hard drive (Time Machine) which is connected via USB.

What would be the best set up to network them all together?

 

[miles01110]

Look into some kind of Network-Attached Storage drive. You will connect it to your router via an ethernet cable.

 

[Hellhammer]

As long as they are all in the same network, it's easy. Just enable file sharing (or other sharings) from System Preferences and any Mac in the same network should be able to use that data, provided that the user has permissions to do that.

 

[satcomer]

It doesn't matter if you are using OS X, Windows or Linux, networking is all the same.

For most any home network first figure out what is the ISP modem device. Is it a cable, phone or fiber modem? Does the the ISP modem have a router built into it?

Now with any Home network it should go in these steps:

1. ISP modem
2. Router (wired or wireless) doing NAT (Network Address Translation)*. That router will be dishing out DHCP (or static) Private IPs.
3. Switch (sometime built into the router).
4. Network devices (computers, TV that have IPs, etc.).

Now the important thing is the router that is closest to the ISP modem should be the ONLY router doing NAT (DHCP or static). Then all devies are in the same subnet for sharing on the network (example: 192.168.0.1 and 182.168.0.5 are in the same subnet. IPs 192.168.100.1 & 192.168.0.5 are NOT in the same subnet network). This way all device in your network can share files with each other.

* Any router behind that first router doing DHCP NAT HAS TO BE setup not to do NAT. This way you will avoid the dreaded double NAT error.