A home or a SOHO network was unheard of just a few years ago. Only big companies had them. The few people who owned more than one computer at home used floppy disks to transfer data between them and an advanced (in those days) feature of Windows called Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) to share a modem in order to connect to the Internet.
Then came the broadband revolution. All of a sudden broadband service providers started throwing in a little box called a router with their package. These routers usually had four Ethernet ports on the back. You didn’t have to worry about setting up ICS any more. You simply had to put a network card in each of your computers and connect them to the router using a cable with a phone-jack-on-steroids at each end. That’s it. The router took care of everything.
Most people associate a router with a shared Internet connection. But what many fail to realize is that a router can do much more than simply connecting them to the Internet. It can act as the cornerstone of a network that has not only computers attached to it but other devices as well. In fact, you can now get all sorts of gadgets that allow you to use your network to its full potential.
The first thing you must know about an Ethernet network is that each device connected to it needs something called an IP address. Think of an IP address as a unique number that identifies that device on the network. In the good old days, you had to assign IP addresses to devices manually. But modern routers have a software program called a DHCP server built into them. The DHCP server automatically assigns an IP address to anything that is connected to the network it is on. That’s why you can simply plug in a cable into the router’s port and everything works just fine.
But a router usually has only four ports. What if you want to connect five computers or devices to it? No problem. That can easily be done. You just have to run to the local CompUSA and get another little box called a hub. A hub looks suspiciously like a router. But it’s not a router. It usually has five or nine (and sometimes more) Ethernet ports on the back. One of those ports is called an uplink port. Some smart hubs don’t have a designated uplink port – you can use any port as an uplink port. You connect the uplink port of a hub to a port on the router by means of an Ethernet cable. Then you can use the remaining ports on the hub as if they were on a router. In effect, a hub adds ports to your network which you can use to add more computers or devices. You can add a hub anywhere on your network. You can even chain hubs to create more ports. Hubs, in effect, allow you to expand your network.
One problem with hubs is that they are slow. That’s so because data flows through them only in one direction at a time. They are like roads under construction where a guy, wearing an orange vest and a Stop/Go sign in his hand, allows traffic in either direction to pass alternately. Better substitutes for hubs are devices called switches. Switches are just like hubs, but they allow data to flow in both directions simultaneously. Naturally they are a little more expensive than hubs.
Okay, now you know how to expand your network. But what will you do with all those ports? As it happens, you can connect all sorts of gadgets to them.
To begin with, you can share printers. "Big deal!" you might say, "I already share my printer from Windows." The problem with that scheme, however, is that the computer to which the printer is attached must be powered on for the Windows share to work. A network attached printer doesn’t have that restriction. As long as the printer itself is powered on, you can print to it from any computer on the network.
So how do you connect a printer to the network? Just as you connect a computer to the network. With an Ethernet cable. But to do so, your printer must have an Ethernet port. Such printers are called network printers. They are not expensive. They cost roughly the same as regular printers. Recently I bought a Brother network printer on sale at Staples for $79.
Once a printer is on the network, you will be able to see it in the Add Printer dialog from all your computers. Just add it as you would a regular printer and you can print to it.
But what if you already have a desktop printer? Again, no problem. You must get another gadget called an Ethernet print server. These gadgets have an Ethernet port and one or more USB or parallel ports. You connect the print server to a router, a hub, or a switch with, you guessed it, an Ethernet cable. Then you connect your desktop printer to the USB port on the print server. As you can see, it’s pretty easy to transform your desktop printer into a network printer.
Once you attach all printers at home or in your home office to the network, printing becomes incredibly simple. No more frantic trips to Staples to get ink or copying files to the floppy to take them to another computer for printing.
Before you trot along to buy a print server, keep in mind that print servers may not work with really old printers. If you have a parallel printer, you are better of throwing it and buying a network printer. Print servers also don’t work with All-In-One (AIO) printers. Some AIOs can print if they are connected to print servers, but you won’t be able to fax or scan with them over the network.
However, you can buy network AIO printers that will allow you to use the fax and scan features from any computer on the network. Of course, you will need to install the software that came with your printer on every computer you want to scan and fax from. Check out Brother’s AIOs if you are interested in these features.
Like printers, you can share disk drives over the network as well. Again, these drives are not a computer’s internal disk drives external USB drives attached to it. They are free-standing disk drives attached to the network with an Ethernet cable which are accessible to all computers on the network.
I’ll go over network-attached drives and a few more gadgets in next week’s column (Part 2). Until then, happy printing!
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