Chapter 50. Troubleshooting Small Office and Home Office (SOHO) Networks
| SOME OF THE MAIN TOPICS IN THIS CHAPTER ARE
Networks aren't just for the office anymore, and they've quite literally come home in a big way. Although home networking was originally popularized as a means to share a single Internet connection, printer, or folder, today's home networks do much more. Home networks are used to distribute digital media content between PCs or between a PC and a digital music player; transmit photos between a digital camera and a PC for editing; and enable console games and digital video recorders, such as TiVo and ReplayTV, to access online content. Although it's still possible to establish a direct parallel or serial port connection between PCs, those methods of communication are about the slowest you can achieve, and the limitation of just two computers leaves little room for growing your network. For a small office/home office (SOHO) network, you can use various technologies to create a network quickly and easily. With the deployment of broadband technologies, such as cable and digital subscriber line (DSL) modems, the bandwidth is finally available to make connecting a home office to the Internet a practical solution. Note You can learn more about SOHO broadband technologies by reading Chapter 16, "Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL) Technology," and Chapter 17, "Using a Cable Modem." In addition, Chapter 20, "Faster Service: IEEE 802.11a," and Chapter 21, "The IEEE 802.11g Standard," discuss wireless standards that are frequently being used together on mediafriendly wireless networks. Dual-band wireless hardware runs streaming media content over the 5GHz, 54Mbps 802.11a network, and uses the 2.4GHz, 54Mbps 802.11g network for conventional printer, file, and Internet sharing.
The number of telecommutersemployees who work from home, as well as employees who travel frequentlyhas been on the rise. A large number of households now have more than one computer or printer, as well as an Internet connection. Because of these and other factors, the Internet is becoming as important to our economy as the telephone switched network (if not more important already). In fact, the rise of business and residential voice over IP (VoIP) service, which uses the Internet instead of the telephone network, is another way that the Internet is changing how we do business at home and at the office. Another factor that has contributed to using the Internet as a means of communicating with a business network is the increasing use of Virtual Private Network (VPN) technologies, which are discussed in Chapter 46, "Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and Tunneling." By creating a secure communications path through the Internet, VPNs help reduce the cost of telecommuting, such as long-distance charges. Windows XP, Windows 2000 Server and Professional, and Windows Server 2003 all provide VPN solutions in the operating system, so the VPN option is not an extra expense to bear. Some routers also incorporate built-in VPN clients. And when it comes to Unix or Linux, you can pick and choose from a large number of VPN solutions. SOHO networks usually are composed of only a few computers or other networked devices, so troubleshooting problems on this kind of network is a lot easier than trying to track down problems in a large network. Most of the hardware components are plug-and-play, and even software configuration is a lot simpler than it was a few years ago. However, no matter what kind of networked devices you have in your SOHO environment, invariably a time will come when a document won't print, or a computer can't connect to a resource on another system, and you'll need to spend some time troubleshooting the problem. Note Appendix E, "Introduction to Setting Up a SOHO Network," will help you better understand the concepts discussed in this chapter, and it is recommended that you read both of these chapters together. Each has information that will help you understand the concepts in the other. If you know how your SOHO network is set up and some of the basics about how it operates, you'll be better trained to troubleshoot problems/solutions discussed in this chapter. In this chapter, we'll look at some common problems you might encounter and methods you can use to troubleshoot them. |
EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 411