Home Network.

damnyanks

Looking into setting up a home lan. Currently it looks like the machine will be at least 15 foot away from each other (3 Desktops). The main purpose of the network will be to share internet connection / files / printer. Possibly lan games also.


I'm leaning towards Wireless due to the distance thing. Not sure about power lines... looks a bit pricey

Do I only require 3 Wireless cards ? Or is anything else needed ? I'd have one machien with the adsl modem and the other 2 machines connect to that and then the internet. Should I be getting a stand alone modem type jobby or what ?

Any advice appreciated

oscarBravo

By far the cheapest and simplest way would be a wired network. Buy a cheap-ass 5-port hub and three cheapo NICs, and you're up and running - it really is that simple. The only problem is trailing wires, but they're not that hard to route.

If you can't live with the wires, you could go wireless. You need three wireless cards and three PCI-to-PCMCIA adapter cards. Set the wireless cards to ad-hoc mode, and they should see each other.

Paddyo

OscarBravo

Why would he need 3 Wireless cards and 3 PCI-To Pcmcia adaptor cards?

Would he not just need 3 PCI wireless cards?

Paddyo

po0k

Right.

Get a DSL Modem/Router/Switch combo.
D-Link 504 or Solwise SAR715. I think both are available in a wireless version if you really want to go down that road.

Get 3 100Mbit PCi NICs for your machines. RealTek 8139Cs should be fine. 3Com 905C TXs are better, by a long shot.
Get yourse a box of CAT5e (€70 for 305m), a crimpers (€15 is the cheapest I've seen) and some RJ45 heads.
I don't know the layout of your house/rooms/PCs, so I'll leave the routing of the cables up to you.
At the moment in our own house (rented, 5 students) we've got cables across the carpet, sometimes with mats over them.
They don't get in the way. If it's your own house, make nice careful holes, possibly routing them up into the attic for a proper switch box/junction. Will make things tidier. Have drops down to rooms where you'll need conenctions.
If you want, get a dedicated 8-port 100Mbit cheap-o switch.
They can be picked up quiet cheap.
Even a 2nd hand 10Mbit 3Com would be more than you'd really need, unless you're going to be transferring lots of large files regularly (like nightly backups across the network of entire hard drives).
you never know when you might want to swtich to optical fibre

Wireless will add ~€80 to the cost of the DSL router, 802.11b (11Mbit) PCi cards will cost ~€60 each.
That 11Mbit is not going to happen in Ireland though. We've got good sturdy concrete walls, as opposed to the wooden panelling and fibreboard found in the states. More likely to get ~5Mbit if the machines are more than a wall apart. Rough estimates mind.
Also, at 1Mbit the latency increases quite a bit.

oscarBravo

Originally posted by Paddyo
Why would he need 3 Wireless cards and 3 PCI-To Pcmcia adaptor cards?

Would he not just need 3 PCI wireless cards?

I'm really just not that familiar with PCI wifi gear. Last time I looked into it, anything that claimed to be a PCI wifi card was just a PCI/PCMCIA bridge with a wifi card stuck in it. The state of the art may have moved on since then.

I'd still do it with wires.