Networks

[Malandro]

I'm Setting up a network at home and i need some assistance. I'm going to have some of those special sockets in each room (J5) but how does the broard band split up down to the cables that lead o these sockets? Will i need to lay cables for each seperate socket and plug them into a router where the main broardband cable comes in?

[manfredini]

Nope. If your system is windows 2000 or XP you can plug the broadband into the server or a workstation and enable file and print sharing. Then you can set up a connection on each of the workstations using the wizard that will share the connection. Note that this will share the total bandwidth if all workstations are being used to access the internet, fro example a 100kpbs line and two workstations = 50kbps each and so on.

[requiem]

You will need a broadband router, some cat5e cable with RJ45 connecters if you're going ethernet, thicknet co-ax with BNC connecters if you're going down the shoddy 2meg route or long USB cables if you decide on an USB lan. The alternative is to dial up or connect using a workstation or server pc, then share the internet connection either using the built in connection sharing provided by windows (right click the dial up --> properties then the sharing tab) or use a program like Sygate which sets it all up for you too. you then need to point the subordinate PCs networking properties to make sure they're on the same subnet, and have the IP address of the router or web-serving workstation as default gateway and primary DNS server.