Home Network

Building Your Own Home Network

This is where it all got started for me.  You might say my first venture into networking was to start my own BBS (bulletin board system).  And I did this with a 20mhz 386 running dos.  I chose the GT Power network because some of the BBS'es I had logged on to around here used that system of exchanging mail and some of the earliest forms of what we now call newsgroups.  I suppose most BBS'es have gone the way of mine...in the closet and a forgotten memory since the advent of the internet.

  We're talking about the old days here...days when I owned just one computer.  I would have to shut my BBS down in those days to use the computer for my personal use and I didn't like that too much, so I installed a program called DesqView.   It was probably some of the simplest forms of multi-tasking back before us non Unix folks had even heard of multitasking.  And it was before Windows 3.0

I would "connect" every night and exchange mail and news groups with other GT Power Users.  A few of us would make the long distance calls for the others here in town so we could all transfer mail and share the discussion groups.   You might say, since we were connecting with folks all over the world that we were in fact networking.  That was back when networking was for big companies and not home use.

My first taste of even thinking about building a home network came sometime around 1992 when Andrew was about to come into our world.  We had been using a guest room off of our kitchen for the office and computer room, but now we would need the upstairs guest room to welcome Andrew home. That meant the downstairs room had to become a guest room (to be used a couple of times each year when family visited and a.k.a. clutter catcher the rest of the year).  That meant the computer had to go.  No guest wanted to listed to the modem pinging during the middle of the night, I suppose.

We have the luxury of having a full basement, so along with a  friend of mine we decided to build a new office and computer room in the unfinished portion of the basement.  Sounded cool.

What then happened is I found I was paying less attention to the BBS and to the computer.

We're about to enter our first phase of home networking.

Another friend, Bob Thompson (you can check out his site at http://www.ttgnet.com) started to tell me about LANtastic.   I didn't know beans about networking...just had always heard it was difficult.   I spoke with Suzy about the possibility of putting a machine in the corner of our kitchen table (she liked to play some dos card games at this time and with the computer gone had lost that opportunity) and she said "go ahead."

With that we were off to the races so to speak.  I found a machine that we could put in the kitchen and Bob and another friend, John Mikol helped me jump into networking. Both John and Bob are computer/networking techies, so I will admit I had an advantage here.  I didn't want any wires running around doors and across the floor and one of them had a 6 foot drill bit, so we knocked a hole in the wall, snaked the drill bit through and punched a hole down to the basement.  We then fished a piece of coax (10base2) cable through to the basement, screwed adapters on each end of the cable, inserted cards into the two machines, terminated the coax on each end, installed the Lantastic adapter independent version of the software and we were networking.   Believe me, it was not as simple as I make it sound now.

It wasn't long before I grew to dislike Lantastic because of the memory resources it depleted on each machine and I was soon into a small Novell network on the same machines.  I had begun to collect some used computer parts, so building a simple Novell server was not an issue.  I do remember buying my first 1 gig hard drive and was elated when it only cost me 50c per megabyte.  I put 16 megs of memory in that machine and it cost me about $500 for the memory.  I don't have to tell you how much memory you can get for that same amount today.

The 10base2 cabling was gone soon as well.  We had started to add a few more machines to the network and the coax cabling became a pain in the neck.  We brought the big drill bit out and starting wiring the house with unshielded twisted pair and we were now into the star system of a 10baseT and a hub.  This made connectivity much simpler.

I was into Windows 3.11 (the networking version) at this point and we're about to dip our feet into the early days of the Internet.  I can remember using the early version of NCSA Mosaic.  hardly anyone had a website at this time, only the major corporations, but the BBS was dying a quick death!

Then along came Windows 95 and Novell was out the window.  Win95 was simple to set up for networking and I was able to use what I had learned during the early days of Win 3.11 and Novell to help me get started with IP addresses and netmasks and other words I had never dreamed of using in my life.

And this brings us to where we are now.  My home computer system now includes 6 workstations, three of which also serve as Windows NT 4.0 servers, a laser printer, an ink jet printer, a scanner, an ISDN LAN modem, another 8 port 10baseT hub and a mixture of 10mb and 100mc network cards.

Networking and running cables were not instant knowledge for me, so I though I would put together some of what I thought might be the more useful links when someone wants to put together their own home network.  I would imagine that many homes today contain more than one computer and it's great to be able to share printers, hard disk space and even internet connections among the different computers.

One thing I began to learn about rather quickly was IP addresses and gateways and netmasks and subnet masks and the like.  I am currently using some IP addresses on my system that have been reservered by the internet administrators as private network addresses.  I use the 192.168.1.1 pool.  You can learn a little more about IP addressing by checking out Jon Hildrum's IP addressing page.