Wireless and wired LAN at our home Wireless and wired LAN at our home

We have now installed a small network at home. There were basically two reasons to do this: We now have a permanent connection to the internet via ADSL and want to make use of this at all our PCs. And of course we want to share data between the PCs.

The network consists of both hard-wired and wireless LAN. 

Current Configuration


                       +--------+     +-----------------------+
                =======| Filter |=====| all other phone lines |
                =      +--------+     +-----------------------+
                =
  __________    =  +---------------+
 / Internet \   =  |  ADSL-Router  |
|    via     |=====| (changing IP) |
 \  phone   /      |- - - - - - - -|   +---------+
  ----------       |  192.168.0.1  |---| Switch1 |
                   |      adsl     |   +---------+
                   +---------------+    || |  |
                                        || |  |
                                        || |  |
                                        || |  |             +-----------------------+
                                        || |  |             | Wireless Access Point |
                    +-------------------+| |  +-------------|     192.168.0.250     |
                    |                    | |                |          wap          | ~
                    |          +---------+ |                +-----------------------+    ~
                    |          |           |                    ~                  ~        ~
                    |          |           |                     ~                  ~          ~
                    |          |      +---------+                 ~                  ~            ~
                    |          |      | Switch2 |--------+         ~                  ~              ~
                    |          |      +---------+-----+  |          ~                  ~                ~ 
                    |          |                      |  |           ~                  ~                  ~
            +--------------+   |   +--------------+   |  |    +--------------+   +--------------+   +--------------+
            |      PC      |   |   |      PC      |   |  |    |    Laptop    |   |    Laptop    |   |    Laptop    |
            | 192.168.0.11 |   |   | 192.168.0.12 |---+  |    | 192.168.0.13 |   | 192.168.0.15 |   | 192.168.0.16 |
            |      og      |   |   |      ug      |      |    |    boerli    |   |     tiny     |   |     mini     |
            +--------------+   |   +--------------+      |    +--------------+   +--------------+   +--------------+
                               |                         |
            +--------------+   |   +--------------+      |
            |      PC      |   |   |      PC      |      |
            | 192.168.0.17 |---+   | 192.168.0.14 |------+
            |     kava     |       |      ug2     |
            +--------------+       +--------------+

Connections:   =====  Phone Line
               -----  Ethernet (100/10 Mb/s)
               ~ ~ ~  Wireless (11 Mb/s)
The PCs are all Linux machines with a 'Netgear FA311' PCI-network card, the old laptop (133 MHz CPU) runs Windows 95 and has a 'Cisco Aironet 350' PCMCIA-card, and the newer laptop runs Linux and is also equipped with a 'Cisco Aironet 350' PCMCIA-card.
The dual-speed hub 'DS104' from Netgear has now been replaced by a 'Fast Ethernet Switch' from NetGear (FS105), because we experienced problems with the hub when transferring large files between the two PCs; the switch runs without problems. Today, we have 'Fast Ethernet Switch' from NetGear (FS108) as Switch1 and a 'Fast Ethernet Switch' from NetGear (FS105) as Switch2.
The ADSL-Router is the 'Alcatel Speed Touch Pro'.
The wireless access point 'WAP11' is from Linksys. My experience with the the WAP11 and the Cisco Aironet 350 is very good: After some experimenting on where to put the WAP, we now can establish a good connection between the Laptop an the WAP in all rooms of our house.
The netmask we use is 255.255.255.0 and the gateway as defined on the PCs and on the Laptops is the ADSL-Router (192.168.0.1). On all 4 PCs we have installed picoFIREWALL and picoFIRESCAN. This would maybe not be necessary, because the ADSL-Router itself has kind of a firewall implemented and also, because we are 'hidden' in a private network.
However, I often establish an encrypted VPN-Tunnel (see also here and the installation description for the vpnclient) from a machine in our home-network to my workplace and then my machine is in principle reachable by anyone on the internet through the IP-number we receive for the VPN-connection. This is one reason we use the picoFIREWALL and of course we have installed the picoFIRESCAN firewall log-utility on PC1 and PC2.

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Last Update: 13Jan2003 -           Created: 26Mar2002           uk