h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The following paragraph could do with being tagged on at the end of the paragraph at subheader "Configuring Each Computer to Recognise the Hub"

Most PCs and Macs should actually be able to use the default settings defined by the computer ant the automatically assigned IP addresses without any problems. If however there are problems, you can set up your network as follows:

oops, meant "and" rather than "ant"

You might want to differentiate a bit between 'modem' and 'router/modem'. You seem to use the word 'hub' where 'router' would be more precise. Routers with built-in hubs are still routers, as hubs are transparrent devices as far as the network is concerned (although it gets wierd with managed hubs, but you can ignore those because anyone buying a managed hub probably knows what to do with them, and has a far bigger budget)

Modem's are just devices that stick outgoing signals onto the line, and take incoming signals off the line. The modem itself doesn't have an IP address (although some plain modems might have a local address for configuration, it's not quite the same as a router).

In a typical home/small office private shared single-IP broadband router/modem connection, you connect up those machines that need access in an ordinary intranet using RFC1918 addresses (10.x.x.x, 192.168.y.x, etc.). The router is one of those machines. The router has two interfaces, one on your network, and one on the public internet. You set the machines behind the router (on your private network) to use the router's local IP address as their default gateway. (which effectively tells your machines 'if you want to talk to X, and X isn't on the local network, talk to Y, which knows how to reach X'

Where you just have a modem, be it USB or Ethernet, it simply acts as a bridge between your networking stack on your machine, and the internet as a whole.

I'm also a little confused by your description of for MacOS. This looks like you are configuring a router, and are using DHCP, whereas the windows process looks like you are using static addresses, and configuring just the local host.

Footnote 3: The alcatel device is also sometimes known as 'the frog' for the same reason.

Footnote 6: You might want to provide a link to ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc1918.txt which is the standards document detailing private IP addresses. rfc3022.txt details NAT (Network Address Translation) which is, in essence, how more than one system can share a broadband IP address. If you do use these links, you might want to warn people that they are heavily technical in nature.

Finally, you may find this link interesting:
http://ftp.se.kde.org/pub/tv+movies/warriors/download.html

It's a movie, 12 minutes 40 seconds long, published by Ericcson, and freely redistributable. (It's also rather large), but it is very easy to follow as an introduction to IP, firewalls, and so forth.

Anyway, nice article. Appologies for the long, and possibly rather raving post, but I'm bored...

Regards,
Jim