Home networking odyssey: The power of perserverance

By Mike Azzara

Chapter 9

Sept. 14: E-mail to Strom: "Plugged in the gigabit switches today, both in the office and in the Family Club. HOLY SMOKES! My Internet connection is NOTICEABLY faster. It takes my breath away. Best part was everything was plug and play, just like a switch should be. No problems at all. We'll have to see if the printer sharing between the Gateway XP machine and the iMac G5 goes that smoothly. If I get the minutes free, I'm going to attempt that tonight. I have to admit, despite all the hurdles, I am having a blast. I made a cat5 cable this morning precisely the length I needed from the top of the Gateway (where I have set the switch) to the Ethernet port. I figured, what the hell."

Sept. 15: Last E-mail to Strom: "Wow, the Mac is supposed to be so easy to use, but not far below the surface it's, er, Unix, ya know? Have you ever connected Macs and XP machines? I feel like there must be some simple trick I'm missing. The fact is, my friend, I have a magical power. It's called "perseverance." I just keep on doggedly plugging away, trying this or that, Google searching, actually RingTFM, trying something else, etc. I have learned that through this method, eventually, the mysteries of the universe reveal themselves to me. So I can tell you that I have been able to mount the shared folders from two XP computers (Tonia's Compaq and my laptop) onto my iMac so far, and in so doing I believe I know how to get the Gateway machine connected. I say I know this, and I am, in fact, confident that I do, yet I'm not sure I can articulate the knowledge in any classically accepted way, owing to its complexity and its ambiguity, combined. And of course, the file sharing is just a little warm-up, just something to prove to myself that I could build a network across which these machines might converse. My ultimate objective is to share a USB-connected printer on the Mac, such that the XP macfhines might print upon it. Verily. But that is for tomorrow; I am for bed."

Sept. 24: Summer officially ended on Friday, my job search began in earnest (resume looks great!), the consulting work was still coming in—and I still hadn't figured out how to get the iMac and Gateway talking. But this past weekend I reconfigured the 300-gig Maxtor and 500-gig SimpleTech together with the iMac. Now all the movie files have been moved from the iMac hard drive to the Maxtor, and they are all backed up on the SimpleTech. I deleted them from the iMac drive, thus making lots of extra room there. And the iMac drive was also backed up to the SimpleTech, which had ample room to back them both up. The Maxtor has become my primary movie file server now, not the internal iMac drive. It’s not a perfect setup, but it’s good enough until I get a real job and buy myself a dedicated movie-making machine.

Mike's Home Networking Odyssey

1: The original home network mess

2: The great modem swap

3: Of scrimping and crimping

4: The first cut is the deepest

5: Mike's first punch down

6: Wiring the family club

7: Microsoft workgroup voodoo

8: From the frying pan to the freezer

9: The power of perseverance

Sept. 27: I finally cleaned up the iTunes library problem on the Gateway. I bought this cool, itty bitty SimpleTech 160-gig drive for about $75, which operates completely off the power supplied by the USB port. Because that errant WD MyBook drive works properly on the iMac, I used the iMac to transfer the iTunes library from the MyBook to the SimpleTech, then attached the SimpleTech to the Gateway, where it works just fine. Ariel moved the part of her library that had been accumulating on the "C:" drive over to the SimpleTech, so now she has about 3 gigs of space on the Gateway drive and 100 gigs still to go on the SimpleTech, which is her "F:" drive. Did I mention she’s a budding music historian?

Oct. 1: Well, I never was able to consistently link the iMac and the Gateway. My perseverance served me well throughout this odyssey, but the iMac refused to yield up its mysteries. For one thing, the boys keep yanking out the cat5 cable from the back of the iMac so they can use Airport WiFi to access the psc2510 to print their homework; that printer remains attached to the Netgear thanks to my fear of trying to reconfigure it any other way. I had yet to get to the bottom of the multiple account issue on the Gateway, either.

But I consider my new network a complete success because all the users I support are delighted. Michael, Tony and Ariel love their new "office" in the Family Club. Tonia is happy that she was right about the "office in Family Club" concept (and that the rest of us were wrong—very wrong, we now happily admit). The Gateway can always print to the Canon attached to my wife's Compaq, so Ariel (who is that machine's primary user) is happy; sometimes (when I log in for her because I won’t give her the password to my laptop) she prints to the HP printer. The iMac can always print to the HP printer because it doesn't need to go through my laptop when it uses the WiFi. The Compaq and laptop back up to each other, although I can see another one of those cool little SimpleTech drives in our future.

Of course, you're never, ever finished with a home network, but that's OK. I've started a list of capital improvements for (OK, all together now!) when I get my next real job! Like replacing the Gateway, which I recently discovered can only be upgraded to a max of 768 MB of RAM. Strom says that's useless for real work, so it should be relegated to the basement and become the IM-only machine I was thinking about.

Meanwhile, I have a new cable modem, new router, two new high-speed switches and first-class cable and/or WiFi throughout the house. Truly, this is a wonderful planet.

Except I just know the Netgear is not 100 percent sound, and that the WiFi printer is a ticking time bomb . . .