Getting the most out of your Home Network

Owing to an increase in internet consumption during the 2020 lockdown, more and more Indians now have a wired internet connection at home. However, most people are still unaware of how communicating devices such as routers, hubs and switches work. While the latter two are now obsolete in a home setup, routers are predominately used in the same. All devices connected to a router are a part of well-defined network referred to as Local Area Network (LAN). These devices communicate using a system (or communication protocol) called Ethernet which operates between the first two layers of the OSI Model.

Apart from sharing the internet, a LAN can be used for many other purposes.

Here are a few ways, to get the most out of your Local Area Network.

1. File Sharing and Network Attached Storage — The most logical use of a Home Network is to share files and hardware resources. Thanks to SMB Protocol, you can create a shared resource present on one device on a network and can be remotely accessed by other devices on a network. That means, your smart TV can access your photos and movies present on your computer, saving you up a lot of time to carry the same content on USB drives. Modern routers have a USB port that allows you to make a Network Attached Storage(NAS). This is essentially a hard drive that is readable and shareable on a network. Other vanilla ways include setting up a File Transfer Server(FTP) on a single host machine and accessing data from other devices.
2. Resource Sharing — Apart from files, other devices such as printers, DVD players can be shared by other devices on your network. That means with appropriate driver support, you can execute print commands from “any” device on your network, be it your iPhone or your Android TV
3. Software Sharing — Another type of sharing is software sharing. A single computer with a licensed software can be shared among all other computers on a network. That means there’s no need to purchase an individual license for each device on your network.
4. Access restriction — A router uniquely identifies devices on a network by their MAC Addresses and by assigning them an IP Address (MAC and IP operate on different layers of OSI Model . Almost all modern-day routers have the capabilities to either grant, restrict or modify behaviour of the devices on the network. This includes blacklisting certain websites (and/or a set of IP Addresses), setting up parental control etc. The default behaviour can also be set for unrecognised devices. These settings are generally accessed by logging in to your router’s interface. All routers ship with a browser-based interface (mostly available at 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1).
5. Firewall Administration — Apart from the software firewall which comes available with most operating systems, all the standard consumer-grade routers inherently have basic hardware firewall capabilities. You can monitor and administrate the firewall from the router’s local IP Address.

These were some of the benefits a LAN administrator can take advantage of.

Thank you for reading this article. Please feel free to relay your comments, suggestions, or corrections at ritiktaneja10@gmail.com.