How To Network Home Computers

If you have a router or a switch to connect multiple computers at home, then you most likely already have a small network. whenever there are two computers sharing information each other, you have a network – that’s my simple definition of a computer network. of course a network is much more complicated than that, if you want to add logon authentication, printers, and file sharing capabilities, then that would be a very complex network, but let’s look at how you can setup a relatively small but useful home network.

what would you need to setup a home network?

basically to setup a small network you need a router, or a switch, DHCP server, DNS server, two or more Ethernet cables, and two or more computers. if you use a  broadband router like a Linksys Internet router, then you won’t need a DHCP or DNS server, because the router already has them . if you don’t have a router, and only have a switch or hub, then yes, you will need a DHCP server to assign IP addresses automatically, unless you want to add IP addresses statically on each device. DNS is used to be able to use computer names when mapping shared drives or content on other computers on the same network ( otherwise you will have to use the IP address of the computer )

one critical step you need to take when configuring a home network is that ALL computers needs to be on the same WORKGROUP or Domain in order for those computers to talk each other. this is something obvious for an experienced network admin, but I have seen many people without much experience missing this step, and then they wonder why they cannot see the other computers on the network.

Setting up the Network

If you have a broadband router, then things will be easy. grab an Ethernet cable and plug it on the Ethernet port on the computer, then plug it in a LAN port on the router.

If you notice, the Linksys router has four LAN ports, and one WAN port. make sure you connect your network computers on the LAN ports, and connect the Internet cable to the WAN port. normally you connect your ISP modem to the  WAN port. once you have the computers hooked up, login to your router and make sure DHCP is enable. by default the DHCP server is enable on any home router, you can also setup the DHCP scope for your network.

from this window you can enable your DHCP server, set your starting IP address range, and number of addresses you want to make available for clients. from here you can also set the DNS IP address, and WINS. normally all these addresses are the same as your router IP address. while you are at it, make sure your router is secure with an admin username and password.

now that you have hooked up your computers to the router, and hopefully the computers got assigned an IP address from the router. now is time to setup the computers on the same WORKGROUP. to join a computer to the same workgroup right-click on My Computer on your desktop, and go to Properties then click on the Computer Name tab and click on the Change button. then join the computer on your chosen workgroup.

restart each computer you join to the network, and then try to ping each of the computers on the network to make sure you can access them. to make sure resources can be shared on the network, you should share a folder on a computer, and then try to access it from another computer on the network. if you can get to the folder, then you have your computers networked, if not, then you need to go back and recheck what went wrong.

now you can install printers, shared folders, etc on the computers on the network, and access them from any other computer on the same network.

cool uh.