Home Network Help

[Procrastinator]

I want to create a home network, mainly to share photos and music, but I don?t understand how to do it. If anyone could provide step-by-step or point me to a website with clear directions, it would be greatly appreciated. Here?s my current set-up.

Three computers in the house: 1) Desktop running Windows XP professional which is wired directly to my router; 2) Laptop running Windows XP professional which uses a wireless card to access the router and 3) iMac running OSX wired directly to my router.

I?ve been told my lots of people that creating a network is possible under this set up but I haven?t seen clear instructions yet. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Kyteland]

You can get some great advice about that kind of thing here

 

[propellerhead]

practicallynetworked.com

 

[techfuzz]

Get into the admin part of your router and turn on DHCP and configure it to hand off addresses starting with 192.168.1.100 up to 192.168.1.150 or whatever you want for the maximum allowed. It really doesn't matter as long as you have at least 1 address available for each computer that will get an IP from the router. Now go to each computer and turn on Use a DHCP Server under Network Properties. Once all the computers have been rebooted and have IP addresses within the 192.168.1.* range, they will be able to see each other. Setup some shared folders on your computers and start moving files back and forth.

techfuzz

 

[thorin]

Try here > http://practicallynetworked.com/linksnw.htm

Thorin

 

[bocamojo]

As suggested, use DHCP with a basic private address, like 192.168.1.1, or 1.100, and do a small range, about 5 or 10, whatever you think you might need. You'll need to configure each PC to be on the same workgroup, like "HOME" or "PRIVATE", etc. Once you're on the same workgroup and the same subnet, all you need to do is setup sharing on the PC or PC's you want to share files/printers on, and configure your PC's to do name resolution (which you can do by creating an lmhost file on each one and configuring your TCP/IP to use the lmhost file).

P.S. If you use an lmhosts file and you use DHCP, make sure you set your lease to something like 30 days.

 

[gunrunnerjohn]

And when all else fails, install the NETBEUI protocol on all compters, in addition to TCP/IP. XP and 2K are designed for DNS resolution, and a workgroup doesn't have a local DNS server. NETBEUI solves a lot of network browsing issues that otherwise crop up, and there's no significant penalty to having it installed, unless you have 100's of machines on your local LAN.