Putting Your Wireless Home Network To Work

Remember that old Cracker Jack commercial of the guy sitting in the bed
when the kid comes home from school? “What’d you learn in school
today?” he asks. “Sharing,” says the kid. And then out of either guilt or good
manners, the old guy shares his sole box of caramel popcorn with the kid.
You shouldn’t hog your caramel popcorn, and you shouldn’t hog your network
resources, either. We’re going to help you share your Cracker Jacks
now! (After all, that’s kinda the purpose of the network, right?) You’ve got a
wireless network installed. It’s secure. It’s connected. Now you can share all
sorts of stuff with others in your family — not just your Internet connection,
but printers, faxes, extra disk space, Telephony Application Programming
Interface (TAPI) devices (telephone-to-computer interfaces and vice versa for
everybody else), games, A/V controls . . . oodles and oodles of devices.
In this chapter, we give you a taste of how you can really put your wireless
network to work. We talk about accessing shared network resources, setting
up user profiles, accessing peripheral devices across the network (such as
network printing), checking out your Network Neighborhood, and other such
goodies.
Entire books have been written about sharing your network, such as Home
Networking For Dummies (by Kathy Ivens), and other books, such as Mac OS X
All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies (by Mark L. Chambers, Erick Tejkowski,
and Michael L. Williams) and Windows XP For Dummies (by Andy Rathbone; all
from Wiley Publishing, Inc.), include some details about networking. These are
all good books. In fact, some smart bookstore should bundle these together
with Wireless Home Networking For Dummies because they’re very complementary.
In this chapter, we expose you to the network and what’s inside it
(and there’s probably a free prize among those Cracker Jacks somewhere,
too!), and that should get you started. But if you want to know more, we urge
you to grab one of these more detailed books.
It’s one thing to attach a device to the network — either directly or as an
attachment — but it’s another to share it with others. Sharing your computer
and devices is a big step. Not only do you open yourself up to a lot of potential
unwanted visitors (like bad folks sneaking in over your Internet connection),
but you also make it easier for friendly folks (like your kids) to erase
stuff and use things in unnatural ways. That’s why you can (and should!) control
access by using passwords or by allowing users to only read (open and
copy) files on your devices (instead of changing them). In Windows 2000 and
XP, security is paramount, and you must plan how, what, and with whom you
share. Definitely take the extra time to configure your system for these extra
security layers. We tell you in this chapter about some of these mechanisms
(see the later section “Setting permissions”); the books that we mention previously
go into these topics in more detail.