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Networking is something that always conjures up fear. If you've been putting off the job, or you have a sort of semi-network that semi works and can't face the hassle of sorting it out, this article is for you. Most networks these days are wireless, based on the 802.11b, g or n Wi-Fi standards. The heart of your network is the router, a box that's wired to your internet connection (and perhaps to a desktop Mac) and transmits a wireless signal around your home. Generally, if you get ADSL broadband over a phone line you use one box that acts as both a modem (to connect to the internet) and a router (to share this connection with your devices). Your ISP may supply one, but you can use any standard modem router. If you have cable, on the other hand - from a company like Virgin Media - you need to stick with the modem supplied, and add a separate router. This is usually any router that doesn't include a modem. Apple's Wi-Fi routers lack a built-in modem. If you want to use an Apple product with ADSL broadband, but already have a modem supplied by your ISP with a built-in router, that's OK – you can disable the modem's router, but check your ISP's documentation. Better still, choose a modem router from another manufacturer. Set up your network Whichever router you choose, the various 802.11 Wi-Fi standards – b, g and n – are inter-compatible, so you should be able to connect most Wi-Fi devices, though you will take a performance hit. There's no problem using components from different manufacturers, but if you're buying a router and one or more Wi-Fi adaptors at the same time, it makes sense to get matching units from the same brand. In almost all cases this will mean better performance. If you're shopping for a used AirPort base station, note that earlier models, along with the AirPort chips in pre-Intel Macs, were 802.11g rather than 802.11n. Routers with identical specifications on paper aren't created equal; reviews from magazines and websites can help identify which models perform best. Don't pay too much attention to user comments, which often reflect nonreproducible problems such as poor reception. Router wrangling Setting up your router shouldn't be hard. The first step is to connect its WAN port to your internet point – via the cable modem if you're on Virgin – and one of its LAN ports (there'll be four of them on any router except an AirPort Express) to your Mac with an Ethernet cable. With some luck there'll be a cable supplied with your router. Apple's base stations are designed to work with your Mac out of the box, and use software within Mac OS X to give easy access to all their features. Third-party routers are usually configured in a web browser: having cabled the router to your Mac, you type in the supplied URL (try 192.168.2.0 or 192.168.2.1 if in doubt) to get a page showing you the options. There shouldn't be much you need to tweak before your router will successfully connect to the internet and to your devices. If it's an ADSL modem router, you may need to enter settings for your ISP, but many routers now automate this. By default, your router should automatically assign an IP (Internet Protocol) address to each device you connect, enabling them to identify each other on the network. This is known as DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol). If you have trouble getting your new router onto the internet, one possibility is that your connection depends on the MAC address of the device that's trying to connect. We'll talk more about MAC addresses later; they're just unique codes that identify a network device, something like 01:2a:3b:45:6c:7d. Your ISP's server may be accustomed to seeing your main Mac's MAC address. This can be found in the Network pane of System Preferences: select Ethernet, click the Advanced button, go to the Ethernet tab and note the Ethernet ID. Your new router will have an option to swap its original MAC address for another, known as spoofing. It may offer to clone your Mac's address, or you can enter it manually. This done, your ISP's server will be none the wiser about your upgrade and should let you connect as before. Alternatively, you could check your new router's own MAC address (found in its setup utility) and register this with your ISP. Secure the perimeter Something you do need to configure carefully is security. You'd be very unwise to leave a Wi-Fi network unprotected. Not so much because other users could access your private files – any resources you make accessible over the network should be password-protected anyway, as we'll see later – but because you don't want them sharing your internet connection. One MacFormat writer with an unsecured router found nine neighbours connected simultaneously. There's also the possibility of people parking outside your house and hijacking your Wi-Fi. Unwittingly sharing your connection will reduce the speed you get yourself. A number of different security protocols have been used for Wi-Fi, and you'll need to pick one supported both by your router and by all the computers and gadgets you want to connect. Older devices will offer WEP, but WPA is much more secure, so choose this if you can. (Some routers also suffer reduced performance when running WEP.) Within the WPA options, your router may give you a choice between TKIP and AES encryption, or may support WPA 2, which is better again and uses the stronger AES as standard. Macs running OS X will handle at least WPA, as do Windows Vista PCs; Windows XP users need Service Pack 2, and for WPA 2 may need the patch available here. Some routers offer an automated 'one-touch' security setup, but this will only work with matching branded adaptors. Instructions will be provided for setting up WEP or WPA manually. If there's a choice of Enterprise or Personal mode for WPA, choose Personal (or PSK). To set up WPA you'll be asked for a passphrase, which can be anything from eight to 63 characters long. Having set this on the router, you'll need to enter it on each device you connect. You may be tempted to choose a short, easy phrase to type in, but this will leave you vulnerable. It's worth using a long passphrase containing randomly selected characters; if your router doesn't create one, there are sites that will, including this one. Getting connected Once your router is set up, make sure your computers and gadgets can join your network. Those that are wired to the router with an Ethernet cable should automatically find themselves connected: just open a web browser and try Google to check. Via Wi-Fi, you'll need to tell each device to find and join your network. On a Mac, go to the AirPort pane of System Preferences, select AirPort, click Turn AirPort On, then click the Network Name from the drop-down menu and choose your router from the list. You should see a padlock beside your network name to indicate that it's encrypted, and on selecting it you'll be asked for a WEP or WPA passphrase. Enter it and tick Remember this network. On an iPhone or iPod touch, open Settings and click Wi-Fi. Turn on Wi-Fi and wait for your network name to show up under Choose a Network. Switch off Ask to Join Networks so that you'll always connect whenever you arrive home. Filter unwanted people out It's great to be connected, but remember to prevent unwanted connections too. Aside from the security measures we've already covered, another way to prevent unauthorised users is MAC address filtering. MAC stands for Media Access Control, and has nothing to do with Macintosh. Every network adaptor has a MAC address consisting of six pairs of hexadecimal digits. In your router's setup page, turning on MAC filtering means no device can be connected unless its address matches the one you've entered into a list. It's not good protection against serious hackers, since MAC addresses can be faked, but it's okay against casual logins. You can use MAC filtering in addition to encryption or, as a last resort, as your sole security method if you can't get WEP or WPA working. You'll need to add the MAC addresses of guests' devices as well as your own. The MAC address of a Mac can be found in the Network pane of System Preferences; Ethernet (wired connections) and AirPort each have their own MAC address, so you need the appropriate one depending on how this Mac will connect to the router. For AirPort, select AirPort on the left, click the Advanced button on the right, and find the AirPort ID at the foot of the AirPort tab. (If your version of Mac OS X is pre-Leopard, select AirPort, click Configure, then find the AirPort ID under AirPort.) You can copy and paste this into your router's setup page. Finally, an extra form of security provided by almost all routers is a built-in firewall. This helps prevent machines on your network being attacked via the internet. Configuring a firewall is beyond the scope of this article, but in most cases it should work fine out of the box. It's worth checking (in the router setup) that it's turned on, and remembering to try turning it off if you ever have problems with internet apps. Besides the application-based Firewall configured in the Security pane of System Preferences, Mac OS X also includes a Unix-based firewall that most users won't even be aware of but runs constantly to prevent intrusion. You can also use Parental Controls, found under System in System Preferences, to govern what each user account can and can't do. Share and share alike Being on the same network means your devices can share both your internet connection and other resources. One of the handiest benefits is wireless printing. An ordinary USB printer connected to any Mac or PC on your network will be accessible to any other Mac or PC, as long as they're all switched on. To share a printer, open System Preferences on the Mac that the printer is connected to and go to Sharing. (Click the Services tab if you're using Mac OS X 10.4 or earlier.) Tick Printer Sharing and click this item to choose which printers to share. If you're a Creative Suite user, the list will include Adobe's PDF virtual printers. (Pre-Leopard, find the list of printers by clicking Show All to go back to the System Preferences pane, choose Print & Fax, then click Sharing.) To access your shared printer from another Mac, just go to File > Print in any app, click the printer from the drop-down menu and choose Add Printer. Printers available on your network will be listed here along with those physically plugged into the Mac. Select the one you want and wait to ensure a suitable driver is found for it, which will appear under Print Using. To access the features of your printer, you should install its driver software on any machine from which you want to use it. Once added, your shared printer will automatically appear among the available printers on the other Mac in the future (under Shared Printers in Mac OS X 10.4 and earlier). You can also access your shared printer from Windows machines. If it doesn't appear under Select Printer in the Print dialog, click Find Printer to open the Network view, double-click the name of the Mac the printer is physically connected to (although you may need to log in at this point, and you should then be able to see and select the printer. Vista may report that the printer's status is Access denied, unable to connect, but like so many other Windows error messages, this is tosh. Share your files As well as using shared resources, all your networked machines can access each other's files and folders. To do this, though, they need permission. On a Mac, you use the Sharing pane in System Preferences to decide which folders other users can see. Much the same options are available in all versions of Mac OS X, but they've been rearranged over time, so in earlier versions you may need to browse around a bit. In the left panel of the Sharing pane (within the Services tab pre-Leopard), tick File Sharing and click this item to see which folders are currently shared. Initially, the only one will be the Public Folder inside your Home folder – the one in Macintosh HD > Users that has a little house icon. By default, with File Sharing on, other users can open files from this folder but can't save anything into it. In Leopard, the Public Folder also has a subfolder called Drop Box; users can copy files into this, but can't edit existing files. On a home network, you may want more comprehensive access, while still keeping important stuff away from the kids or accident-prone flatmates. This is handled through user accounts. Although you may have forgotten about user accounts if you're the only person who uses your Mac. You are in fact logged into your system under a particular identity at any given time. If you click Accounts under System in System Preferences, you'll see your own account at the top, normally classed as Admin (administrator), and any others you've created below, plus Guest Account, which applies to anyone who logs in without a username and password. To control access, you should create a user account for each other person you want to allow into your Mac. Who goes there? Back in the File Sharing pane, clicking a shared folder shows who's allowed to do what. For example, you have Read and Write access to your Public Folder; any other user is allowed to read only; and so is Everyone, that is, all of the above plus guests. Click permissions to change them. Choose No Access (or click the minus icon below) to deny this set of users any access to the selected item. To share more, click the + sign below the Shared Folders column and select a folder – you could pick your whole hard disk, but it's safer to be more specific – then edit its permissions. Bear in mind that, if you log into this Mac from another using this Mac's administrator name and password (the same one you use when unlocking System Preferences or installing new apps), you can access any files while File Sharing is turned on, so you don't need to give yourself specific permissions. Another way to share a folder is from Finder. Select any folder and press Cmd+i to Get Info, then look under Sharing & Permissions. Click the padlock icon and enter your admin details to make changes. To access a shared folder from another Mac, select Network from Finder's Go menu and you should see all the machines on your network. Double-click the one you want. In Leopard, you're then automatically logged in to that machine with the user account currently active on the Mac you're using. To log in with a different name and password (for example, your admin account), click Disconnect to downgrade yourself to a Guest, then Connect As… to enter your own login. In Mac OS X 10.4 and earlier, when you double-click a machine you're invited to enter a name and password; or, select Guest to skip this and see only shares available to Everyone. Through the windows You can also access your shared resources from a PC. First you need to tell your Mac to play nicely with Windows over[...]