OT: wifi setup advice

[The Natural Philosopher]

just hope you don't have foil backed plasterboard as a vapor barrier into the loft...

Bloody wifi. I am SO glad I cabled this house with CAT 5 everywhere.

[PCPaul]

That's true. As you can tell from the stone walls, the house I put that in was 150 years old and had lath+plaster ceilings - no problems there.

TBH I've got Gigabit going down cat-5 to a switch in the living room for my laptop and the XBMC media centre by the TV. My wireless is for visitors, gadgets and occasionally for the neighbours whenever their Sky connection drops out (again).

Wireless is nice, but I wouldn't want to live with it.

[dennis]

It doesn't because a wireless router can be used as an access point anyway. You just turn off the built in DHCP and connect it to the LAN using a LAN port. My 802.11a network uses a netgear router as an access point and the 802.11G uses the sky router.

[John Rumm]

You seem to have dug up a rather old thread...

IIRC the original thread was about adding access to a non cabled location in a house with potentially hostile construction to WiFi.

dennis@home wrote:

It doesn't what exactly?

Hmmm, and?

[dennis]

I know, I just fired up my old machine and it sent it. I must have shut the lid before it was sent before.

That's the trouble with having too many machines.

I tried to cancel it but there wasn't much chance.

[clumsy bastard]

yesterday I fitted Netgear Rangemax, easy process, covers all over house and they answered by support request with some good info within

24 hours. To get its best speed, you want to use a Rangemax card or USB stick thing in the laptop end. I can now sit in bed and use my Dell mini to speak to you lot. My one is ethernet connected by they seem to have different kits for different setups. She might even like (switchoffable) blue fairy lights it has :-)

[clumsy bastard]

I'm going to show this to my technophobe mother in law, I'm determined to get her on "Milk and More" deliveries (add things up to 8.20 pm and its on the doorstep next morning - spuds and heavy stuff she cannot carry).

[clumsy bastard]

can I add a dumb Question here. I have my cable router set up in the Ethernet cable between the modem and the PC and I have the wireless card in the mini laptop, it all works. Can I do more? Is there any file sharing possibility there, or is it purely "splitting" access to the BB connection? I'm looking at those spare Ethernet connections marked LAN on the router.........

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I have a modem/router which also provides a WAN. Can communicate between all the machines on it - including between this RISC OS one and the PC. You should be able to tap into the network anywhere - I have a four outlet port feeding the two machines here from one RJ45 outlet. I only use the WAN for my phone and visitors. ;-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

Course you can. Networked printer, add a file server, add a web server..

[The Natural Philosopher]

I trump you with a 16 port switch and 4 computers and a printer currently connected. :-)

Running..erm.MacOSX, Linux, Windows..talking SMB, appletalk, direct port printing, ..and running 5 web servers all publically accesible, DNS services and a proxy web server: Not that that gets much use.

Not bad for a 20 quid a month connection, a Ebay D-link adsl router and some scrap PC's and macs..

I think the only NEW kit on the whole shebang is a scanner..

Oh. The monitors and keyboards are new.

[John Rumm]

The default for most of these devices is that the wired and wireless sides are bridged to appear as one network. Hence anything on any port (wired or wireless) can see the internet and each other. Some have options to have the wired and wireless side kept separate.

[Roger Mills]

But don't forget that you'll have to enable sharing of any resources on one PC (hard drives, folders, printers, etc.) which you want to be able to access from other PC(s).

Assuming you're running some flavour of Windows XP, go to Start/Help and Support, and then click on Networking and the Web, and then on Sharing files, printers and other resources.

[dennis]

I currently run:

two desk tops five laptops two Wifi routers each with four ports (two are used to connect them) one buffalo networked disk one dedicated email server two blc10 network cameras two homesight units and six cameras a brother networked all in one an ASUS wl-hdd and stuff I have forgotten.

I appear to be the only one for miles running 802.11a.

As for OS, I run xp, vista, linux (x86 and mips) and some I don't recall.

[The Natural Philosopher]

...and remove most the firewalling that windows seems to install by default these days.

[clumsy bastard]

I did a bit more reading and I think all I need is some file sharing, although I will Google the things you mentioned. I read a tutorial on making files visible across the network (and the Internet!) so did a little test, right clicked a folder I had set up and made it share, then as I had run out of time I made it unshared rather than leave what might become a security risk sitting there and XP went bonkers, "no access" messages if I tried to do *anything* to the folder I created *and* its parent, all users-documents! Luckily a reboot seems to have solved it, hope that's not common!

[clumsy bastard]

yep, that's just the sort of basic comment I needed, that's given me places to look.

Yep XP home. Great, that seems like the logical place, this seems like fun, getting a degree of sharability across the three machines, it was also nice to find the Xda phone works as a modem to all networks (we tend to go to places where free wifi or 3g is 100 miles away).

[Dave Plowman (News)]

You can password protect shared folders. You can also set your firewall to only allow access to designated computers.

[Lobster]

AFAIK not possible just with XP Home Edition, though - wish it was.

David

[Lobster]

You might want to follow the example of an aquaintance of mine, who lives in the US: his old mum back in the UK dictates her weekly shopping list down the phone to him in New York, from where he logs on to Tesco and organises the delivery for her. She hasn't a clue how it all works, just that somehow it does...!

David