Home networking odyssey: Lessons learned

By Mike Azzara

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If I can terminate Ethernet cables and get different computers to share their hard drives, printers, and Internet connections, than anyone can. 

I'm the former publisher of CommunicationsWeek. That experience gave me a solid knowledge of industry market forces and a healthy fear of what can go wrong when you make a change to a network. Well, a mind-numbing terror, actually. 

It also helped me foresee a future with lots of home computers and large, complex home networks—my house included. (After all, I'm the father of three -- triplets, to be precise.) Back in 1997 we renovated our home to add separate bedrooms for Michael, Tony and Ariel, and I asked the electrician to run cat5 cables from the basement to their second-floor rooms. Fast-forward to 2007: Given the sorry state of our home network, which has seen many pieces of computer equipment come and go, I was determined to transform long-abandoned, dormant cables into the glorious network I knew we could have. And since I lost my job in July, I was determined to complete the network before summer's end, when I'd begin a new job search in earnest. 

When I first started thinking about turning my home network odyssey into this series of articles, I had two reasons in mind. First was to demonstrate to you, gentle reader, that you can build your own home network because if I could, anyone could.  Second was to uncover some practical lessons as I stumbled through my virginal home network build. These takeaways are valuable to those of you who will decide to make your own attempt.

Here are seven lessons we distilled from the experience:

1. You can do it: I may be guilty of beating the proverbial dead horse, but if Strom had told me a year ago that I'd be stripping and terminating cat5 Ethernet cable, I'd have told him to quit the crack. But doing so, while daunting at first, became easy after some study and practice. (Here's a link to the page that made it possible for me to wire my home network.)
2. Plan, plan, plan: Planning ahead and thinking through each change, especially in terms of how it will affect everything else in a home network, is crucial to disaster avoidance. I spent the first half of the summer just thinking through various network scenarios.
3. Check/verify each change: Plan in advance how to verify that a change has worked or had the intended effect. If you make multiple changes before verification, you'll have a harder time pinpointing a problem. For instance, when I had problems with video chat, I changed just one item--the cable modem. Then I retested the video chat and it worked, so I knew it was the old cable modem that was the bottleneck.
4. Persevere: Getting network software settings right is essentially voodoo. But any relatively intelligent person will eventually make sense out of the gibberish that passes for instructions in this industry and get most anything to work—as long as you stick it out.
5. Google is your friend: Whatever you're up to, you're not the first. Google the words you imagine in the solution to your problem, or just ask Google your question and hit return. Sometimes you have to read several articles or forum posts before you can make sense of the solution, but you’ll get there eventually. I did. (See "Persevere.")
6. When all else fails, check the firewall: Yes, Norton keeps us safe--by preventing communications. Some firewall settings need fiddling before your computers can get intimate over your network, particularly the "Trust" settings in your firewall.
7. Listen to your users, I mean your family: I saved a ton of time and trouble by not rigidly adhering to the model I originally planned, and instead left things the way my kids preferred. They're perfectly happy with their printer being a whole floor away, something my wife and I can't fathom.

The rest of this series of articles is a sort of diary. It details every step I made in going from four computers and two printers with no real connectivity among them to DADNET, a unified network where the computers can all "see" each other and share each other’s printers and hard drives (on a good day). The diary exists thanks to David Strom, a colleague and friend of 18 years who literally wrote the book on home networking. (He is also editor-in-chief of this site, Digital Landing.) David has served as my personal IT support guy, but when he moved out of state, I could no longer drag him over to my Long Island, N.Y., home and feed him in barter for networking chores. Instead, I’d send him e-mail describing my plans, my progress, and my questions. He gave me advice and counsel, and in our e-mail correspondence he saw this diary. 

Here are the chapters in my quest for holy networking grail: 

• Chapter 1: The original home network mess
• Chapter 2: The great modem swap
• Chapter 3: Of scrimping and crimping
• Chapter 4: The first cut is the deepest
• Chapter 5: Mike's first punch down
• Chapter 6: Wiring the Family Club
• Chapter 7: Microsoft workgroup voodoo
• Chapter 8: From the frying pan to the freezer
• Chapter 9: The power of perseverance