Macintosh/Windows home network

[nesbitt_a]

Hi all,

I'm currently a university student - and myself and three friends will soon be moving into a new flat. We will be installing 1mb broadband, and it has been suggested that we install our own network - so we can share printers/files and most importantly internet-access.

We are currently running two PC desktops, one on windows xp home, and one running fedora redhat. The other two systems are laptops, one windows xp professional, and my powerbook running panther. How would we even go about setting up a network? Would it be possible to avoid the need to run a computer 24/7?


Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated. Andrew.

 

[edesignuk]

Get a rounter with built in switch and DHCP server. You plug your boradband in to the rounter then all the other machines in to switch (same unit). All the machines get an IP from the DHCP server built in to the router/switch, and all can connect to each other and the web. It works perfectly. D-Link, Linksys, they all do broadband routers, check them out.

 

[James_C]

I would suggest getting a Wireless 802.11g Router that has a build in Broadband Modem. For example a Netgear WGR614. I assume that you will all be in separate rooms and may not want loads of cable trailing about the place. The Router that I mention above has 4 Ethernet ports on it, so you could wire the Desktops via Ethernet cable (or install a wireless card) and the two laptops could roam freely using wireless. You will need a airport card in your Powerbook and you PC friend will need a wireless card for his laptop, unless he already has it built in. If your PC friend has the older wireless standard 11b it will still work with the 11g router, but all wireless access will fall to 11b speed (which is still faster than the Broadband connection)

With the Netgear routers (I suspect others work the same way, except I am not familiar with them), you can configure them via a web page interface (Explorer or Safari) from Any Mac or PC connected with it. You don't need to connect these devices to a PC for them to work once they have been initially configured.

 

[Westside guy]

The Fedora box

The networking will work best on the Fedora box if it's plugged in via a wire to the router. If you're going to use wireless for it (the Fedora box, not the others) you MUST use an 802.11b card, not 802.11g. Unless things have changed dramatically in the past two or three months - and that's unlikely - there just aren't any 802.11g drivers for Linux yet.

This isn't a problem, as James already pointed out.

Also, for wireless on the Fedora box you'll want to be sure to use a wireless adapter that's supported. This can be trickier than you think. Back before I had this Powerbook, I bought what I thought was a supported PC card for my Dell laptop. Turns out the manufacturer switched chip suppliers somewhere during the production run, and *my* card had the newer, unsupported, chipset.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pcmcia-cs/

If the Fedora box is connected to the router with a wire, it'll just work "out of the box". Since it's a desktop this shouldn't be an inconvenience, unless you're gonna trip over the wires.