Configuring Your Home Network

Any of you who work with a partner, be that a spouse, significant other or hired hand, find that you have a need to pass files from one computer to another. Sometimes you might split up the tasks required to complete your claims. In our operation, for example, I write the narratives, label the photos and diagram the risks. If it is a flood claim I typically fill in the NFIP reports. My wife, writes the estimates and pretties the report before PDFing to send it in. She also proofs everything to make sure I didn' missaspeel anything on my photo labels or in the narrative. For us to work this way efficiently, we have make use of the "backup" computer which requires we are networked together.

We use a wireless router on our network so that we do not have to, well, you know... run wires. This also permits us to share one Internet conenction. Keep in mind that if you are using a hotspot for your Internet connection, you will not be able to share the connection, but you can still pass files to and fro, back and forth, etc.

A host on a network is any piece of equipment that has a MAC (machine access control) address and requires access to the network. This would include your computers, print servers and wireless routers. Typically on your small home network you would have your wireless router also serve as your DHCP server. DHCP stands for Dynamic Host Control Protocol. It is the server that assigns an IP address to your host when it requests an address. This is done by assigning the address to the MAC address that made the request. It is call "Dynamic" because your computer might not get the same address everytime it boots up and connects to the server. Every sinlge computer on the Internet has a unique IP address. There are certain classes of IP address that are reserved for "internal" networks. These are networks that can operate independently of the Internet. This permits a common bank of addresses to be used on many internal networks without them interferring with each other.

An IP address is made up of two parts. The first designates the network, and the second designates the hosts. Currently there is a move to increase the number of numbers in an address to 6 known as IPV6. But it will not negate the older and still in use IPV4. IPV4 addresses have, you guessed it, four numbers separate by three dots or decimals like 0.0.0.0. (The last dot in the previous example is the period enging the sentence and is not part of the IP address.) Unless you plan to purchase and use an IPV6 router, you only need to concern yourself with IPV4.

There are four classes of addresses that have different numbers of hosts that can be used. Basically, the more numbers that are used to designate the network, the fewer hosts that are available and vice versa. It is not permissible to use just any bank of addresses that you want, as addresses are assigned by the address assignment powers that be. You can use either 10.0 network or the 192.168.1 network.I usually use the 192.168.1 network as I will never have need for more than 255 adresses on my home or small office network. The address that are available are 192.168.1.0 through 192.168.1.254. The first is typically reserved as the network address and the last is typically reserved for the broadcast address. Just remember not to use either of these two addresses.

When you buy a wireless router, it will usually default to setting the routers internal address to 192.168.1.1. I recommend leaving it that way. If you go with the default, you can't forget what you changed it to. A router has two addresses. The one we just spoke of for its internal network address, and the one for its external address. The external addresses is the one assigned by your ISP and can be either assigned by their DHCP server or can be a static address which usually costs more and is unecessary unless you plan on running a web server from you house and need your IP address to be the same all the time. The routers internal IP addresses is the one that the hosts, or computers, on your home network will use as their "gateway" to other networks, including the Internet.

Click on the following links for instructions on configuring the different parts of you network. It really is simple.