Okay, so you want to get the office is up and running with a couple of computers sharing a high-speed Internet connection. In the early to mid 90s you would have needed a network expert to get to this far. But it’s the 21st Century now; the knowledge required to set up an environment like this has become ubiquitous. Practically every computer comes with an Ethernet card, and anyone can walk into a computer and electronics store to buy a hub or a switch and some patch cables. Furthermore, nowadays ISP’s usually supply routers or cable modems that are defaulted to do Network Address Translation (NAT) and serve IP addresses dynamically. It’s all so very plug-and-play now; so much so that setting up a simple LAN with a gateway to the internet no longer requires any knowledge of networking. It all works very well… until it doesn’t.
Things begin to get interesting when you start adding devices to your new LAN (like a wireless router). This new device may have the same default IP Address as your ISP’s router, or it may also be doling out IP addresses via its own internal DHCP server. At this point you’re going to have to configure something, so plug-and-playtime is over. At this point you’ll need at least a rudimentary understanding of how networking and TCP/IP works. Luckily for you, what you need to know isn’t much, and you can readily find solutions to most simple networking problems with the help of the internet and a good search engine.
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