Not long ago I became a proud owner of a MacBook, which created a need for a home network setup. Since the comfortable dimensions of the computer allow for working on a different places inside the apartement, I went for the wireless LAN.<\/p>\n
Zeldman\u2019s recent trouble with his DSL line<\/a> encouraged me not to pull all my hair off. Luckily, my dilemma was somewhat of a different nature. Since we live in a rented flat plus the local branch of T-com<\/a> won\u2019t sell you a DSL line separated from a phone line (and the phone line owner, which I\u2019m not in this case), the default modem\/router they\u2019d provide along with a two year contract was not an option.<\/p>\n For the last few weeks I spent some time learning how to match PCs and Mac on the same network\u2013you know: manually et all. In fact I always wanted to learn more about this area, but never had a need for it… We have almost five years old XP Pro installation on my main PC and only God knows what ports and sockets I blocked back then when it was the only machine in the house. With PC being such a fortress, traditional Windows Network Setup Wizard wasn\u2019t very helpful, so I had to buy some extra hardware to handle all the traffic. When I purchased it, the super quiet MacBook Pro was meant to be the only machine still awake and working in those late evenings when the family is in bed.<\/p>\n The real trouble was the original modem provided by the ISP, which was connected to the PC with USB cable. Needless to say, that particular model is absolutely useless with Mac OS, but the local telecom supports Windows OS only. Thanks for nothing… Finally, I bought D-link DSL-G684T<\/a> DSL Wireless Router (Download manual & latest firmware<\/a> in Croatian). I\u2019d go for LinkSys<\/a>, but unfortunately they don\u2019t have wireless routers with DSL modem built-in.<\/p>\n Anyway, if you want\u2019t to do it right, you have to do it yourself. Automatic DHCP didn\u2019t last long, \u2018cause with every restart of any of the network devices all the IP\u2019s messed up. At the end all the relations had to be set manually, so now the router is In the router interface, which is by the way rich with options, but ugly as hell\u2013I set a range of static IPs, with MAC<\/acronym><\/a>\/IP pairs, so now there is no IP hijacking when some of the machines is pulled out. All the non-assigned IPs are disabled, which is additional security layer (at least that\u2019s what they told me).<\/p>\n The thing which caused me the most headache were VPI and VCI numbers, which were predefined for the German market. Fortunately (or sadly), I was not the first one with such a trouble, so I found a valuable forum post, where I found correct VPI and VCI values<\/a> along with solutions for other possible causes that are on your way when establishing ADSL connection.<\/p>\n WEP security protocol is easy to crack\u2013you probably wouldn\u2019t want to support all the neighborhood kids hanging on your line. WPA\/WPA2 Personal is much more secure, but some older devices won\u2019t work with it. Read very brief Configure Wireless Security for small Network<\/a>.<\/p>\n Another security layer is limiting your antenna transmit power to as low as possible. For my needs I lowered it all the way down to 6% (the lowest value router allows) and it still gives me great performance anywhere in the condo. Naturally, if you keep your signal down, less network scanners would notice your presence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Home network oddities… when you have a Mac in Croatia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maratz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maratz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maratz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maratz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maratz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.maratz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maratz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maratz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maratz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Router, DHCP and network setup<\/h3>\n
192.168.1.1<\/code>, PC is 192.168.1.2<\/code>, Mac 192.168.1.3<\/code> and so on…<\/p>\nOn to DSL setup…<\/h3>\n
A few additional home networking security tips<\/h3>\n