Setting up a home network

[blueonblack]

I've been wanting to set up a network in our home but honestly don't know the first thing about it. I have a desktop with XP without wireless capability, my wife has a laptop with Vista Home Premium and built-in wifi.

What I would like to do is to have a physically separate storage area with two hard drives in RAID1 configuration (mirrored array), that we can both access wirelessly for storage. I know I would need something to add wireless capability to my desktop, and a router to connect them but beyond that I am lost. Can anyone guide me from there?
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VAPORIZER INFORMATION

[SgtM]

What you'll need:

1. Wireless router. I like Linksys products

2. Wireless PCI card. Although, I recommend staying wired for desktops. Put your wireless router near the computer, and just run a short CAT5 jumper to it.

3. Separate storage means a home server. Get an old box and throw linux on it. That is, unless you have a spare XP Pro license, or a server 2003 license. With the server, you'll definitely want to have a wired connection. Once you get it built, run it headless and use VNC or remote desktop for administration purposes.

Setup is really a breeze. These routers are plug and play. There really isn't much you have to do. Though, I do recommend setting up some kind of security for the wireless. Disable the SSID broadcast, setup WPA2 with MAC filtering, and you'll be fine.

[AMD Killa]

you wont need a dedicated computer for your RAID. You could get a NAS 2 drive RAID enclosure, then connect it to your router through UTP cable (cat5e). Yes, the dedicated machine would be the cheapest way, but only if you have spare parts lying around.

Don't forget to setup some encryption on it, and remember to change the default wireless key (and administrator password) so you don't end up losing control of your network.

Even if you disable the SSID broadcast, it still broadcasts, it's just that computers are told to ignore it. However with some clever little programs for linux, they can still be seen. However, I would still disable it, but only after you have set it up fully so that all your wireless devices have a profile for your network.

Need any more advice, just post your questions here, and we'll sort em out for ya

[Luke122]

Adding Wifi to a laptop can be done a few different ways. Depending on the laptop, the best solution is to go with an internal "mini-pci" type card. No external connections or antenna at all. Next best would be a pcmcia or card-bus wifi card. A little pricier usually, but just plug it in and go.. you dont even need to reboot to install most of them. No risk of void warranties either (though some manufacturers cover mini-pci installs under regular usage, like Asus I believe.. make sure before you do it.)

Final option is an external USB device.. which I personally hate, since I'm always afraid of snapping it off by bumping into something or whatever.. ugh. Cheapest option by far though.

The other guys nailed the rest of the install, so I wont even comment on that.

[blueonblack]

Great information, guys, appreciate it. (SgtM, I followed you pretty well until step 3...)

Luke--> The laptop has wi-fi already, it's the desktop I need it in, but if I have the router hooked to the desktop with a hard line I won't need to worry about it, right?

I saw a dual-drive SATA RAID external hard drive enclosure on Newegg...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817121042

But I'd rather not buy it if I don't have to. My motherboard supports RAID, can I configure 2 drives in a standard external enclosure with the onboard RAID controller without doing anything to my internal drive?
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[Bopher]

SgtM has it right on for you. The 'headless' unit is just another computer running an OS that can your other computers can connect to over the network.

Right now I have as an example, 2 desktops running wireless, 1 laptop, Wii, Palm and both cell phones can connect to the wifi in the house. My router sits on top of the entertainment center next to the modem. My file server sits right next to the entertainment center only hooked up via cat5. The only reason I have the router in the living room is so I can connect the PS2 directly.

My file server has no monitor, mouse, keyboard hooked into it. I can access it over the network using a program called PCAnywhere but its an older copy I bought a long time ago. You can use VNC or remote desktop which are free or even sign up with logmein.com but you'll be basically accessing everything out over the internet and back again which means internet goes down, no server access. Using these programs will allow you to 'see' the server desktop on another system. That way you can do stuff like file maintence, virus check or just check the over all health of the system. I have stuff scheduled to happen but I like to poke in every so often and make sure my disks aren't about to say go into nuclear meltdown and I never knew.

[nevermind1534]

The Wii is close to my computer, so whenever my sister would play newer games, or especially using the internet, it would kill my wireless connection. The kitchen is also below my bedroom, so It's near impossible to get a wireless connection when the microwave is running. It's been fine so far with my 50ft cat6 ethernet cable that I ran aftter I lost my third antenna.

[crenn]

Enabling RAID on that motherboard could cause problems (unless it's already enabled). I'd be careful as you may have to reinstall windows (this may not be the case).

A dlink or netgear wireless router would work well.

Something like this maybe:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833122016

[Crazy Buddhist]

Luke--> The laptop has wi-fi already, it's the desktop I need it in, but if I have the router hooked to the desktop with a hard line I won't need to worry about it, right?

That was the first thing I picked up on - don't you use the internet on your desktop? I assumed yes meaning it was plugged into the router. ipso facto sum, plug your network raid storage box or homebrew machine into said same router and you are nearly done.

The router will offer whatever services the storage box offers to any machine in the same windows workgroup.

Have it set to share a folder on the C:/ drive to the home network. You will have printer and filesharing turned on on all three machines and ensure they are have exactly the same name for the workgroup.

You could run the storage machine on Linux really nicely as it will run a Samba server that monitors which machines are on the network and which not and what services they are offering (you might like to make your printer or a folder on your HDD available to your wife for easy file sharing for example). then you can go into the network properties and turn off computer browser and turn it off in windows services on both yours and your wifes machines - the server will do that work of keeping check of whats where. One of the resident Linux gurus will probably recommend a distro for you. The same applies to any flavour of Windoze too. set computer browser to on on the storage box if it will always be on and you can even connect your printer directly to that machine too.

Make sure that your firewall is not set to block netbios traffic but that your router will block it from the outside world (standard out of the box but not always). If all else fails try setting all three machines to static IP addresses in the range of the router (usually 10.0.0.2 to 10.0.0.255 or 192.168.1.2 - 192.168.1.255) normally this requires a reboot to take effect. If you only want each machine to access the storage box you could set firewall rules to have extra security in case your wireless network is breached. For details on wireless security read the Wireless Networking how to in the Wiki HERE.

Good luck !

Matthew

[blueonblack]

Ok, first of all, thanks for all the info, guys. Let me describe what I've decided on and you can pick apart any problems you may see.

Dual-drive RAID external hard drive enclosure:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817121042

Two SATA hard drives:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822145166

Wireless router:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833156242

eSATA bracket:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812226006

I have dialup Internet so the Ethernet port is available for the router. Once this is set up and running we should both be able to access whatever is on the two discs (in RAID 1) in the enclosure, correct?

Oh yeah, I'm running XP and she's running Vista, can the two even communicate nicely?
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