Quick Guide: Setting Up Your Own Home Network
For anyone who is fortunate enough to own multiple PC’s with network interface cards (NIC’s) installed and plugged into a small hub, this is a quick walk through of setting up your own home network. It assumes that you have enough knowledge about your computer and its Windows 9x operating system to navigate through a few set up dialogs.
First, let’s go to the Windows Control Panel. Double-click the Network icon, and let’s give your computer a unique name, entered in the form under the Identification tab:
Figure 1: Unique machine name, with common Workgroup
By the way, in our example, BOD stands for Blue Opal Design, and ASUS is the manufacturer of the motherboard. You can pretty much choose any name for the Computer and the Workgroup, but don’t include any spaces, and try to avoid really long names. Remember: each Computer’s name must be unique (don’t call all your machines “BOB”), but the Workgroup name will be shared by all your machines
Next, let’s give our machine a unique IP address, and use a subnet mask common to all our machines:
Figure 2: Unique IP address with common subnet mask
Each portion of the address separated by a “.” is called an octet. The subnet mask above indicates that the IP addresses for this workgroup will only change in the last octet, which is typical for a simple home Peer-To-Peer network ( meaning, all machines are equal, with no domain controllers or routers connecting them; the hub doesn’t count!).
The entries for the DNS, Gateway, and WINS configuration tabs should remain at the default values (basically, empty).
By the way, the IP addresses used in this example were actually recommended by Microsoft, especially if you are using Internet Connection Sharing (I’ll leave it up to you to decide if you want to use ICS: it’s a tricky little devil to set up if you’ve never done it, but it comes free with Windows 98SE and 2000, so I figured, “Aw, what the heck!”). Microsoft used to recommend the sequence starting with 192.168.001.001 and ending with 192.168.001.255, saying that this range was reserved for smaller private networks and would never be used on the Internet, but I guess they decided to muck things up again and reserve an even lower subnet for ICS. Go figure!
Other bits:
Verify that you have Client for Microsoft Networks loaded, and leave it at the default settings:
Figure 3: client for Microsoft Networks at default
If you intend on sharing data between your machines*, make sure File and printer sharing for Microsoft Networks is installed:
Figure 4: File and printer sharing for Microsoft Networks
Again, use the default values.
The last critical piece is the file “lmhosts” in the Windows folder; mine looks like this:
# settings with internet connection sharing:
192.168.0.1 BOD_ASUS bod_asus bod_asus.blueopal.com
192.168.0.2 BOD_SRV1 bod_srv1 bod_srv1.blueopal.com
192.168.0.3 BOD_DEV1 bod_dev1 bod_dev1.blueopal.com
#
# intranet at work
135.111.102.182
jupiter5 JUPITER5 jupiter5.ih.myjob.com
135.111.102.101
gannen2pc GANNEN2PC gannen2pc.ih.myjob.com
135.111.102.161
gannen3 GANNEN3 gannen3.ih.myjob.com
#
*well,
if you didn’t intend this, just what would a home network be good for? ;-)
Figure 5: Hey, this is another handy tip in itself!
The minimum amount of information to include is a unique IP address and name for each machine on your network. In my example, an “lmhosts” file containing
192.168.0.1 BOD_ASUS
192.168.0.2 BOD_SRV1
192.168.0.3 BOD_DEV1
would work just fine.
I’m definitely not a networking expert; I only know what works for me, and every home network I have set up has worked (so far). It gets a little trickier if you use NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 Server as a domain controller, but if you have gone to the trouble of setting up either one of these operating systems, then you probably already know what you are doing. It’s not likely you’d bother setting up DHCP for a handful of workstations, so you would once again use static IP addresses like we did above. I had this kind of network running for about 2 years, first using NT 4.0 then Windows 2000 Server as the domain controller, until the CPU fan burned out on the server and toasted the chip. Now I just use peer-to-peer since it’s quicker and easier to set up; unfortunately, it’s no guarantee that the fan won’t burn out again!
Good luck, and
above all, HAVE FUN!
Gregory
Annen
January, 2001