That with NAS is probably the easiest route.

everyone can print and no machine needs to be left running except the router, maybe the printer (which will likely have a sleep mode).

if you want network storage, there are many other options you could use. my house uses a gentoo-based server (which also functions as an rsync server!) with smbfs for windows-friendly usage.

obviously, like thompson and thrash have illustrated, your network can get far more complicated, but a network with wireless using non-broadcast sid and mac restrictions is sufficient for almost any home.

Dlink DNS-323 NAS storage enclosure

It does a number of things you probably want

• file and print sharing
• auto-backup all of your machines
• lets you add new disks via USB or whatever and uses the space automatically
• does file-level replication so that if a disk fails you don't lose that data

You can get a pre-made box that has WHS already on it, or you can buy just the software and put it on a machine you already have.

Wireless will absolutely be slower than wired connections, but for accessing the internet you won't notice. The big scenario where you will want wired connections is moving video files or ISO images from machine to machine, or streaming them for viewing/burning. If you don't do a lot of this, or don't mind if it takes a while, wireless will be fine.

You can probably stop reading here, but i'll continue on if you're curious:

One thing I would recommend doing is having an intermediate device between your customer premise equipment [i.e. your cable modem or dsl modem] and your actual PCs. The equipment that the cable and telco's usually provide typically isn't very good, and you may get into the situation of needing to power cycle that stuff now and then to re-train a connection. This was especially true with Qwest's ActionTec garbage.

Essentially, you want to configure the vendor supplied CPE to be as stupid as possible. You want it to forward all traffic more or less unmodifed to a good routing device that you can specify and control, and you want that device to do your internal DHCP. That way if you need to powercycle your modem you don't knock out parts of your internal network.

Finally, i tend to disable the on-board wi-fi capability in the vendor supplied modem/router, since i want my wifi-usage to be on the "internal" network and again, the vendor supplied stuff usually isn't any good. Most consumer wireless access points are also a bit flaky, and so again, don't run your wired gear through them.

So my overall picture is
DSL modem -> 2-NIC PC running OpenBSD -> gig-E switch -> my internal PCs, and my internal wireless access point, (which only acts as a wireless bridge for laptops). All the PCs are plugged into wall plates that lead back to the gig-E switch. My media room has a smaller 5 port gig-E switch that is chained off of the main switch.

In my setup, the OpenBSD machine does everything for the internal network, such that power cycling the DSL modem [or shutting it off and removing it] has no affect on internal network traffic, host resolution, etc. You could just as well use a netgear integrated switch/router/access point if you found one that had the features you wanted and showed sufficient reliability. The PC i'm using I got over 10 years ago and it has never missed a beat. It typically goes a few hundred days of continuous uptime before I patch and reboot it.

Wired Gig-E helps a lot if you'll be moving or streaming video files around your home network; it's effectively faster than the hard drives the data is being read from / written to in most cases.

Raider;293035 wrote:
I have no way of running cable to all the points where the pc's are located so it has to be wireless so my speeds will suffer anyway correct?

Yup. Not to mention that using a USB external HDD will be slow anyway. I have a 1TB USB external HDD and I think I only get an average of like 14mb/s actual transfer rate.

Take the enterprise home... at least that's what I did. HAHA.

GSR/Dubbsy/Jim wanna chime in on this?