Chapter 15: Setting Up a Local Area Network (Kids web site)
Chapter 15: Setting Up a Local Area Network In the home or in a small business, Red Hat Linux can help you connect to other Linux, Windows, and Macintosh computers so that you can share your computing equipment (files, printers, and devices). Add a connection to the Internet and routing among multiple LANs (described in Chapter 16), and Red Hat Linux can serve as a focal point for network computing in a larger enterprise. This chapter helps you set up your own local area network (LAN). The procedures described here provide a foundation for sharing the computing resources in your home or organization. In particular, the chapter describes how to use Ethernet cards, wiring, and protocols to connect computers. It then tells you specifically how to configure your Red Hat Linux computer so that it can communicate with other computers. Understanding Red Hat Linux and Local Area Networks Connecting the computers in your organization via a LAN can save you a lot of time and money. The amount of money you put into networking hardware, even in a small configuration (less than five or six users), can save you from buying multiple printers, backup media, and other hardware. Add a single, shared Internet connection and you no longer need multiple modems and Internet accounts. With a LAN, you don t have to run down the hall anymore with your file on a floppy disk to print it on your friend s printer. Information that had to wait for the mailroom to make the rounds can be sent in an instant to anyone (or everyone) on your LAN. With a LAN, you begin to open the greatest potential of Red Hat Linux its ability to act as a server on a network. Because Red Hat Linux is more robust and feature-rich than other computing systems (certainly for the price), adding it to your LAN can provide a focal point to workstations that could use Red Hat Linux as a file server, a mail server, a printer server, or a news server. (Those features are described later in this book.) Creating a LAN and configuring it to be useful consists of three steps: 1. Setting up the hardware This entails choosing a network topology, purchasing the equipment you need, and installing it (adding cards and connecting wires). 2. Setting up Ethernet Red Hat Linux must be able to recognize the Ethernet card in your computer, install a driver for it, and make it available for use by Linux. (For supported cards, this is done easily during Red Hat Linux installation.) Ethernet is the protocol that enables messages to get from one machine to another on your LAN. 3. Configuring TCP/IP To use most of the networking applications and tools that come with Red Hat Linux, you must have TCP/IP configured. TCP/IP lets you communicate not only with computers on your LAN, but to any computers that you can reach on your LAN, modem, or other network connection. This chapter focuses on Ethernet as the underlying network because it is by far the most popular LAN protocol. Protocols are rules for communications between computers. To expand beyond your LAN for example, to share an Internet connection from your LAN to the Internet there are several other protocols that you could use. Ethernet is a CSMA-CD type of network, which stands for Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection. On this type of network, data is broadcast on the network for all to see, then picked up by the
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