How Do I Network Computers?

Answer:
Whether in a small office, a large company, or even

in your home, there may be a time when you would like to network multiple computers. Networking computers together allows the computers to share network resources, such as an Internet connection, a printer, or even a file share.

To begin with, you need to decide if you want to have a wireless or wired network. A wired network will require all of the computers to contain a network card. You will then set up a central hub or switch, and will attach Cat5 cables from the computers to the central hub. A cat5 cable will have the appearance of a large phone cord that has eight wires instead of four. With a wireless network, if all of the computers have a wireless connection, you can set up a wireless access point on the network that they can all connect to.

Once the connections are in place, you will need to make sure they are all on the same TCP/IP scheme. A TCP/IP address will have four octets, for example, 172.22.100.101. Each address will also have a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. In this example, the computers will all need to begin with 172.22.100.xxx, and the last octet unique among all the devices. Otherwise, they will not be able to see each other.