Want to set up small home network and need some advice

[erchie]

I have two computers (#2)-2years old, (#1)-1week old) and want to set up a small home network that will allow me to access files on computer (#2) while at computer (#1) and vice versa. I think it can be done easiest thru a router, but am flopping around with possible choices of a new router upgrade. Anyone have any recommendations for the most reliable and most compatible (easiest to install), and fastest (AC or would N serve) router available? There are some good N routers out there-- but would an N router be fast enought to take full advantage of the 75Mbps cable signal I am receiving, if all five computers (3 LT, 2 DT) were sucking on the bandwith from an N router? I am presently considering the Trendnet AC1750 Dual Band Wireless Router (TEW-812DRU), but I really have no use for streaming movies by wi-fi, so that is probably overkill for my needs. I am also looking at the Asus RT-N66U Dual Band Wireless N900 Gigabit Router. I'm open to any other brands if they are compatible with Linux, but some of the other brands seem iffy with respect to Linux. Any advice would be appreciated.

I also have a Logitech K260 wireless keyboard/mouse on my newest box (1), and am wondering if there is any wireless keyboard/mouse set available with a different USB dongle frequency for box (1), or should I just get a USB wired keyboard/mouse for box (2)?

[Snowhog]

See I've network shared my two PC's - YEAH!!

[Spadge]

I don't think I have ever experienced brand iffiness with routers and Linux. I mean, standards are just standards, right? You're more likely to get problems with adapters than routers.

But then, I don't use wireless at home much.

I have always found TP-Link routers to be perfectly serviceable without being over-expensive. I guess it depends on whether you want to be able to plug in an external HDD to the router and use file-sharing that way, and whether you want to use stock or customised firmwares as to what you really want to end up with routerwise.

[Detonate]

I've set up networks with about 50 different routers. What I look for in a router for my on personal use at home is reliability. And I find myself always falling back to my old favorite, a Linksys WRT54g which I have had for years. This is the older box shaped one, not the newer one.

[oshunluvr]

"Easiest" and cheapest would not be a router. An un-managed switch is the best choice if all you're doing is connecting computers. Of course, there's no wi-fi that way.

I have an Asus RT-AC66U with that does AC class as well as dual channel N and G. Worked right out of the box with the exception of me having to learn about how to properly setup dual channel N. I haven't tested AC class as I have no AC devices yet. The DLNA media server worked immediately also - just plug in an external hard drive or USB stick.

My previous Router was a Linksys WRT54g model 1. Updated with Tomato and still works well (my son inherited it) after more than twelve years.

My home network currently features the RT-A66U, a 24-port TRENDnet TEG-S24G switch, a cheap-o Rosewill 8 port switch, and the Verzion supplied Westell UltraLine Series3 A90 for my connection to the world.

[erchie]

Thanks to all of you who commented on this thread and pointed me in the right directions here. You have all contributed to my success in getting two computers to talk to one another in my home network. I bought an Asus RT-AC66U router, which arrived ten days ago-- it was easy to set up, and now I am getting download speeds reaching peaks of 100 Mbps on both desktops simultaneously, downloading via Comcast-- that is a big jump from my old WRT54GL router, which delivered only 25 Mbps, tops with the same test. I had the new Asus router set up in less than a half-hour. Then I downloaded openssh, and took about another half-hour to get the two computers networked, but only in one direction. I am still learning more daily. I bought Carla Schroder's "Linux Networking Cookbook" which arrived from Amazon the same day the router arrived, and it was a big help, too, with the acronyms and explanations of the functions for the various software parts. Now I am trying to get my HP OfficeJet Pro 8500A Premium to work on the LAN using the USB port on the Asus router-- so far, I haven't done much of anything with it, as I am digging around on the internet to find out what I can about the Asus and its supposedly "Microsoft Only" USB ports-- we'll see about that. The unfortunate thing about the 8500A is that it requires you to set it up using the USB connection before you can run it via its wireless. Right now it is connected only to one of the two desktops via USB. I'll puzzle it out eventually, I hope.

[SteveRiley]

What is your incoming Internet speed? Mine's almost 100mbps, and at that rate, I have to pay attention to an often-ignored spec: the WAN-to-LAN performance metric. If that metric on your router is lower than your Internet speed, then you're throwing away money on your connection.

Fortunately, the fine folks at Small Net Builder measure this for us. In fact, it's the default metric that appears in their router charts. When you see the chart, you can instantly know which models to eliminate from consideration.

[erchie]

Thanks for the Small Net Builder router charts link. There is a whole lot of useful information there! My Comcast account is set at the Blast level using their Arris TM722G DOCSIS 3.0 modem, and since Comcast recently doubled my connection speed, the most I can hope for is around 100 Mbps-- and it seems that is just what I am getting through the Asus RT-AC66U router on my wired ethernet LAN, downloading on both desktops simultaneously. My Linksys WTR54GL was giving me only ~25 Mbps with both desktops simultaneously downloading, and ~50 Mbps with one desktop downloading. I am not disappointed with the Asus's performance thus far. I'll see how it works when my two teenage sons get here with their Acer Aspire notebooks, PSPs, and Android (Motorola Razr) phones working via wi-fi. They were doing pretty well last summer with the old WRT54GL, so they will surely get better results this summer with the Asus. Now, if only I can figure out how to connect my HP OfficeJet 8500A to the LAN via the Asus router's USB connection. The printer has to be configured by USB before it will work on wireless for some reason, but the hitch might be in the manual for the new router where it indicates that you must use the Microsoft utilities on the CD that came with the router to configure the two USB connections on the Asus. I haven't got around to fiddling with it yet to hack it, but I will eventually, I hope. Then I can have everything on the LAN connected to the printer. I am also thinking about getting one, or maybe two ASUS PCE-AC66 Dual-Band Wireless-AC1750 Adapters for the two desktops so I can run them by wireless on the 5GHz wi-fi setting and have one or both of them in separate locations in the house. I love fiddling around with Linux and all this networking stuff-- at 75 years old, it's keeping my brain from shinking to the size of a walnut.

[oshunluvr]

You can still keep the WRT54 connected and let them use that. Thus protecting the wider band width for yourself!

What I did here - because several of our devices are N class wifi but no dual channel or AC class (yet) - I kept my provider's wifi device on and then set both 2.4 and 5 ghz channels on the AC66U to different freqs. That way we all have three choices for connection. I haven't really done any serious testing of the wifi as it's mostly for the wife and kids, but the new device seems quite a bit faster.

BTW: I'm 51 with a 9 year old daughter, so I'm right behind you!

[SteveRiley]

You can still keep the WRT54 connected and let them use that. Thus protecting the wider band width for yourself! ... I haven't really done any serious testing of the wifi as it's mostly for the wife and kids

You are one mean husband and father. Sheesh.

[oshunluvr]

Well, when you put it that way - it doesn't make me look good, does it?

[erchie]

My youngest boy was born 58 days after I turned 59-- he is 15 now, and finishing his freshman year in high school. I have 6 kids altogether: Four boys and two girls. My oldest boy is 31 and was born when I was 44. He has 2 jobs, working for Apple and SEOGear/iPower. My youngest daughter is 28 and is a member of the staff on a cruise ship-- she is the only one of my kids who is following in her seafaring fathers' footsteps . My other daughter (30) is 'married' to a commercial video producer. I have 2 grandsons, 8 and 7. All of my kids were started on computers around the age of 3 to 5. They have all grown up well experienced in Linux, as well as Windows (that must have come from their mothers' genes), and OSX. In my house, there has been only Linux, since 1999. Prior to Linux there was OS/2 and prior to OS/2 there was DOS, among 1, 2, or 3 machines, at various times. I registered as a Linux user as early as 1996, with a registered member number in the low 8,000s range-- I long ago misplaced the index card I had written it on, and I don't remember what it was, as the index card was probably stuck in a book I left behind when I moved back to the US after living overseas for 22 years.

I conscientiously have never used any software from Microsoft-- I used IBM DOS, Q-DOS and DR DOS, on the IBM PS/2 Model 50, which I bought in 1987, when it first came on the market-- That IBM system cost over $7,500 with all the software (WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, a primative graphic desktop called DesqView, and IBM's Easy CAD, a low end program-- but it was very good, and I used it a lot), and the peripheral hardware I bought with the computer (IBM widecarriage 24 pin printer, a 1200 baud modem, (which was later replaced in the early 90s with a Zyxel dial-up modem: $800!) Around 1989 I added a RAM card to the PS/2's motherboard, to boost its native 1 megabyte of RAM by 8 megabytes more-- I was already using a Q-DOS utility to load programs above the 640KB limited RAM where DOS operated. I loaded a key-accessed thesaurus, a dictionary, and other standby programs into that upper RAM every time I booted the PS/2, using a batch file. Batch files were my obsession! I also used an on-the-fly disk compression utility to double the 'size' of the original 20 MB hard drive to 40MB. Before the World Wide Web there was no internet as we now know it-- but there were a couple of local Bulletin Boards I could access without paying long distance telephone fees. In 1994 I was one of the earliest if not the very first person to sign up for the first-ever ISP to set up shop in my neighborhood. There was a rumor going around that our area was going to get internet service-- so I found out who was going to be offering it, and called them before they were open for business to say I wanted to be one of their very first customers. Whether I actually was the first or not, I never found out. And today, I can't even remember what the name of the company or their address was. Names and addresses changed even while I was using it. I remember only that the changes were not intuitive.

Following my IBM PS/2 purchase in 1987, with every subsequent computer I bought, I immediately wiped Windows off the hard drive as soon as I got it out of the carton, and installed OS/2 on all of them, starting with version 2.0: pre-Warp (yr 1992-- 1GB RAM--80486) and in 1996 I began installing my first Linux distro, Caldera 1.0, from floppies, dual booting it with OS/2, in place of the Windows 3.x that came already installed on it. Batch files were my savior! But I could not get Caldera to work-- specifically its Spyglass browser-- there was no graphic desktop yet-- it was all CLI, all the way, and none of the commands were DOS-like. In fact NOTHING worked anything like DOS. Then, after two or three weeks in 1996 playing with Caldera, and trying to learn something about the commands in bash and what they did, I acquired Red Hat 4.0 to be installed from floppies, which still I could not get to run except in CLI. After a few more days fiddling with Red Hat, I discovered SuSE (can't remember the version, but it was the first version that came out with KDE-- a full GUI, and I downloaded it onto floppies-- LOTS of floppies-- all very Germanisch English languagey-- and that very same day I read an article in a newly arrived Linux Journal that said Linus Torvalds ranked SuSE at the top of all the current distros for its most elegant graphic desktop and ease of installation and use, and he had installed it for his wife to use, though he was still using Red Hat for himself. Linux really took off for me after that. I re-installed SuSE from another package of floppies I mail-ordered from Walnut Creek, CA, within a couple more weeks, and it was even better-- it was specifically for the US market! SuSE became my distro of choice, and stayed that way for almost 10 years until 2006.

2006 was the year Microsoft started playing footsie with SuSE, and when I learned that, I immediately made the jump to a relatively much talked about new runaway distro called Ubuntu. I opted out of the Gnome desktop but acquired a new 64-bit custom built AMD box I ordered from All Around Geeks in Portland, OR, which they shipped with a DVD packed with the latest release of Ubuntu. (They were a great bunch of guys to work with, but in later years when I wanted to order another box from them, they sadly were out of business-- at least under the name All Around Geeks. They were a good house.) I used the Ubuntu that was already installed to download KDE, and after KDE was running well, I purged everything to do with the Ubuntu desktop. Running APT from the command line turned out to be a snap: it was really easy to learn, and it did everything to get rid of garbage you no longer without breaking dependencies. It was much easier than SuSE had been. The 64-bit box AAG built for me in 2006 was powered with an AMD Athlon dual core chip and 4 GB RAM and an Asus motherboard, which unfortunately had paper-wrapped capacitors, that would eventually result in a shortened life for the whole system-- only 5 years. I also had an older Intel box which I traded a full bottle bottle of Lagavulin single malt scotch to acquire second hand with Windows on it. I immediately formatted the hard drive and installed Kubuntu, with separate partitions for /, /boot, and /home. (I was tired of losing all my personal files when I did a clean upgrade of Linux.) The box had a single core 32 bit Intel chip with hyperthreading-- it was very fast, but dropped dead from heat stroke only a year after I got the newer AA Geeks 64-bit AMD Athlon dual core box. I also had an older MSI 655 MAX, 32 bit box with Intel Inside, custom built, and wouldn't you know, IT died, too, within 6 months, of heat stroke, so now I was back down to a single box-- the AA Geeks AMD Athlon dual core 64-bit, which was still alive, but it made me worry-- I mean, having only one computer now, where I'd had three, a few weeks before made me as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. It was like going into the desert with no water! Then the AAG box finally and unexpectedly died, of swollen paper capacitors (7 of them) and I found myself without a single computer in the house, for the first time in 25 years! I got in my car straight away and drove to another town 30 miles north of my little burg, where there was a small custom builder of computers. He had one box on the shelf, custom built (not for me, but ready to go off the shelf) so I bought it for cash right on the spot with no OS, a Gygabyte motherboard, a dual core AMD Athlon II chip, and 2x2 GB RAM filling its only two slots. I took it home, installed Kubuntu, got on line, and ordered two 4 GB RAM chips from Newegg and a discrete Gigabyte Radeon HD6450 video card with 1 GB video RAM and DSub + DVI + HDMI connectors. I was back in the Linux business (not in a commercial sense, of course, because I was doing nothing with my computers to earn money). Then-- low and behold-- the 300w power supply on this box-- my single, my only, my latest computer-- well, it died-- the box I had just bought a year and a half ago, and to top it off, my 20 year old suburban was in the shop for several days with an electrical problem, so I had no transportation and no computer to order anything on line. I still had a working phone, though, so I called an itinerant computer repair man in a town 60 miles away to the west, and he came within two hours to install a new 460w power supply, and was more than reasonable when he handed me his bill. But this was the final straw! I needed another computer for back up.

I called Puget Systems in Auburn, WA, spent a couple of days talking with Daniel there, and came up with a completely custom built box designed by ME (with Daniel's help), fitted with a 3.8 GHz AMD A-Series A10-5800K quad core chip with 2x8 GB low voltage 1600 RAM in 2 of the 4 RAM slots, Onboard Radeon HD7660D Video, Onboard Sound, a Samsung 840 Pro 512GB SATA SSD, and USB 3.0. And of course the usual DVD, etc, drive. The box has a Seasonic X-560 super quiet power supply, Gelid Silent Spirit chip cooler, and a Silverstone TJ08-E case with a quiet 120mm fan, all case fans equipped with removeable dust filters easily removable for monthly cleaning. Only the 2 blue lights on the front of the case tell you it is turned on-- it's that quiet. The workmanship at Puget Systems is something to behold: Rolls Royce quality: open the side of the case, and there is not a single cable, not even a teensy little wire, to be seen, anywhere. It is the best computer I have ever owned. And I have it LAN-ed to the other computer. Sorry, I got off topic here. But to carry on:

As my kids came along, they each learned to play video games on OS/2, and then SuSE Linux, which were both installed on two or three dual booting computers at various times In late 1999 I made my first attempt at networking via a twisted cable and FTP, between two computers, but to this day, I can't remember how the devil I did it-- I was coached over the telephone by an IT guy who worked for my ISP on how to do it, and-- voila-- it worked! (The ISP guy was a Linux user, also). So, I am still breaking personal new ground with Linux-- the evolutionary system wonder of the new millenium. May Linux still be around, maybe in newer iterations, possibly unrecognizable by that time to any of us old geezers who might still be around in the year 2100. Maybe some of our replaced body parts will be Linux powered! Think of where the state of automobile design was at the beginning of the twentieth century, and then try to guess where Linux will be at the beginning of the 2100th century.

Maybe the nightmare of software patents will have ceased to exist by 2100, and all who write computer code can treat it like the mathematical language it always has been and always will be.

Maybe the world will have even replaced all patent lawyers with AI robots.

[oshunluvr]

Wow, what a great history! I was glad to see OS/2 in there. I was a huge fan and user from 3 through Warp until IBM stopped support. I vacillated from Linux to Windows and back for a few years before landing firmly on Mandrake 7.0. I installed it from a stack of 3.5" floppies. I "cheated" on Linux a few times but the more I stuck with it the more it (and I) got better. I've been totally MS free for 12 years now.

Thanks for sharing your story.