I share an
apartment with 4 other people. We have one phoneline. We have five
computers. For an entire 8 months, we hated eachother for the simple reason that no one could *ever* use the phone, since someone was always a) calling us, b) calling out, c) using their modem, d) bitching about having been kicked off when trying to use their modem. Argh.
Now, having considered a networking project before, I had 500 ft. of
cat5 cable sitting around, one
crimper, 25
RJ-45 connectors, and one
10baseT 8-port hub. All cheap shit, but it cost me a total of $50. My roommate, finally fed up with the phone situation, subscribed to Bell's DSL service. Great.
I actually got motivated. I banged a hole through our wall with a wooden spoon I found in the kitchen. I ran a 10ft. cable I had left over from the dorms through the wall to his room, and plugged the puppy into the hub. I plugged my computer into the hub with another leftover 10ft. cable. I threw a new
NIC into his computer, since the other one was for the
DSL line. Tested it out, and viola: a network...
I cut and crimped three cords (100', 120', and 45'), something I had *no* idea how to do. I did *not* have a cable tester. One broken RJ-45 connector later, everything was up and working. I threw "
Client for Microsoft Networking" onto everyone's computer, along with
TCP/IP and
IPX/SPX for games. I specified each one's IP, and set their Workgroup. I
duct-taped the cable along the walls, since the place is such a dump already that no one will notice. Fearing the worst, I hooked my roomies
iMac up as well, thinking there was *no* way it was going to work. I downloaded a cheapo
freeware proxy server. Boom. Up and running.
WWW worked...
AOL IM worked...
SMTP and
POP3 worked..
NNTP worked..
FTP works (mostly)..
I messed around in the iMac settings until I found the PPP settings, and I specified the
proxy server IP in
Internet Explorer. Viola - iMac is online.
Don't ever let anyone tell you it's hard to put a network up. I'm a computer science major, but I don't know the first thing about
LANs and the whatnot, unfortunately. Sure, I could have bunggled around with a Linux box,
NAT,
IP-masquarading, or other scariness. I love a challenge, too, you know. BUT.. I also love having high-speed 'net access NOW... and that's what I have, not a headache from setting up a
linux box (let alone finding one to be dedicated..). Since I'm in and out of
BeOS, win95,
QNXrtp, Linux, and
OS/2 everyday (OS's give me a hardon) I couldn't put the
DSL line on my machine.. Thus:
the evil demon that is Microsoft comes through again. I even found a proxy server that handles
DNS, so everyone's computer has nifty names like 'mike.2009Bishop.mtl' (for Mike's computer, at 2009 Bishop St,
Montreal).. This impresses the dumbies to no end.
Well.. that's it.