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The TredShed’s Got Wireless…….

We were asked recently by the owner of Tred­Shed, Craig, to recon­fig­ure their net­work. They also wanted to add wire­less capa­bil­ity, and update all their com­put­ers. The first thing we do when set­ting up a new net­work is to eval­u­ate the exist­ing hard­ware. After an eval­u­a­tion we found that their main router was caus­ing inter­mit­tent prob­lems. Another issue was that their last IT guy had lim­ited net­work­ing expe­ri­ence and assigned their machines a seem­ingly ran­dom array of IP addresses, with a totally unnec­es­sary, and con­fus­ing sta­tic IP address setup. Because of this setup they were unable to add or move machines to their liking.

Tred­Shed had exist­ing Linksys com­po­nents, so we decided to choose Linksys net­work­ing com­po­nents that would com­ple­ment their exist­ing hard­ware. We chose a Linksys WRT54G wire­less router as their main WIFI com­po­nent. We also chose a BEFSX41 Fire­walled Router. This sev­ered two pur­poses, to replace their old prob­lem­atic router, and to increase their net­work secu­rity with a hard­ware fire­wall. Now-a-days fire­walls are manda­tory, whether it be a hard­ware fire­wall or soft­ware fire­wall. In my own expe­ri­ence, as a test, I’ve left an unpro­tected Win­dows XP SP1 com­puter on a sta­tic inter­net con­nec­tion with no fire­wall. The machine will even­tu­ally be loaded with adware and in time become com­pletely unus­able, and all with­out even open­ing a browser or using the com­puter. This is another rea­son why it’s so impor­tant to stay up to date.

After an ini­tial setup, we con­fig­ured their routers for a DHCP net­work. This will allow them to eas­ily add on machines to their net­work if they need to grow. Once that was com­plete all we had to do was setup TredShed’s new WIFI hotspot. After only a few short hours we were fin­ished, and Craig is now happy to offer his cus­tomers free wire­less inter­net access. So if your in the Pitts­burg area with car trou­bles, and you need to get that report in, stop at Tred­shed. Tell them the Gurus sent you