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08/26/2002 Archived Entry: "Adventures in Home Networking"

So Dave and I have finally set up a home network. We've got 2 Macs and a PC all sharing the same DSL connection from Sympatico. I know very little about networking and had a vague idea that we needed a router - but that's about all I knew. I went online to Sympatico's Home Networking Learning Centre (their meagre offer of support for people with home networks) and ended up even more confused then when I started. I called Brent and asked for his advice - 'cause he's so smart. He explained everything to me so that I could understand - slowly and with very small words ;-).

Dave went out and bought a 4-port Linksys router. We opened it up - everything - including the manual was in French. Oops. Must have been a router that was supposed to go to Quebec. Luckily, they had a PDF of the English manual on their install CD.

Of course, Linksys doesn't support Macs and Sympatico doesn't support home networking. We were on our own. We had to set everything up from my testing PC and then totally guess at what we were supposed to do to set up the internet connection on the Macs.

It worked - kinda. We had an internet connection from all three computers - but the Macs were super, super slow. I'm talking bad dial-up connection slow. I'm talking type in the URL, hit return and then go back to reading a book for a few minutes before the site would show up slow. I could surf from my PC for a few days, but this certainly was not a good permanent solution.

I did some Googling to see if someone else was having the same problem. I skimmed through tons of useless talk about Macs and networking, router comparisons, Mac and PC networking and slow internet connections until I finally found an article about how to set up a router on a Mac with a short mention of a similar problem in the comments at the bottom of the article. Someone had responded with the suggestion to open up the TCP/IP control panel and make sure that there were no name servers listed. Apparently, a slow connection can be because of troubles with the DNS resolving. At some point (before the adventures in home networking) Sympatico tech support had given me bogus name server addresses and I hadn't deleted them from the control panel.

So I deleted them. Voila! Back to quick connections and hooray! the adventure is over.