Wireless Home Networking - Index of

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Part III: Installing a Wireless Network
2. Add your dial-up or broadband Internet connection for that one PC.
Ensure that everything is working on your wired connection first. If you
have a broadband modem, get it working on a direct connection to your
PC first. If you’re using a dial-up connection, again, get that tested from
your PC so that you know the account is active and works. Make sure
you can surf the Web (go to a number of sites that you know work) to
ascertain that the information is current (as opposed to coming from
cache memory from earlier visits to the site).
3. Sharing a broadband or dial-up connection with a router, add your
home network routing option.
This step entails shifting your connection from your PC to your router;
your router will have instructions for doing that. After that’s working,
make sure you can add another PC or other device, if you have one, by
using the same instructions for your router. Make sure that your PC can
connect to the Internet and that the two devices can see each other on
the local area network. This action establishes that your logical connectivity
among all your devices and the Internet is working. Because you
may be installing an AP on an existing broadband or dial-up network,
we’re covering the AP installation first; we cover the installation of the
router and your Internet sharing in Chapter 10.
4. Try adding wireless to the equation: Install your wireless AP and
wireless NICs and disconnect the wired cable from each to see
whether they work — one at a time is always simpler.
By now, any problems that occur can be isolated to your wireless connection.
If you need to fall back on dialing into or logging on to your
manufacturer’s Web site, you can always plug the wired connection in
and do so.
If your AP is in an all-in-one cable modem/router/AP combo, that’s okay. Think
about turning on the elements one at a time. If a wizard forces you to do it all
at once, go ahead and follow the wizard’s steps; just recognize that if all goes
wrong, you can reset the device to the factory settings and start over (it’s
extreme, but usually saves time).
Setting Up the Access Point
Before you install and set up a wireless network interface adapter in one of
your computers, you should first set up the wireless access point (also called
a base station) that will facilitate communication between the various wireless
devices on your network. In this section, we describe how to set up a
typical AP.