Shared Residential Networking

[peter grimes]

Our new upstairs neighbors, friends of ours, are up for sharing the costs of our Internet connection. We're going to try it for a couple of months to see if it's a good fit.

We mostly stream Netflix and Hulu, that's 97% of our bandwidth.

They do the same, but he also torrents comics.

We have unlimited bandwidth/data, so I'm not worried about that side of things. I'm worried more about security.

Any advice for someone who knows next to nothing about this?

Our cable modem runs our TimeCapsule. They also have a TimeCapsule. I don't know if it's possible, but I'm thinking it's gone to be best to have two separate wifi networks running off the same cable modem.

 

[Zelig]

"Modems" don't actually provide wifi networks, they just connect to your ISP. Modems which provide wifi have built-in routers, which are pretty much universally awful and devoid of features compared to standalone routers.

You can check your modem/router combo setting page to see if it can run multiple networks, but it probably won't. If you get any standalone router running DD-WRT (and others, if you don't want a WRT router) you can put the modem in bridge mode and configure the router to do your routing.

DD-WRT multiple WLAN setup: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Multiple_WLANs
Cheap router with DD-WRT support: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833166064
Better router with DD-WRT support: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833162070

 

[peter grimes]

"Modems" don't actually provide wifi networks, they just connect to your ISP. Modems which provide wifi have built-in routers, which are pretty much universally awful and devoid of features compared to standalone routers.

You can check your modem/router combo setting page to see if it can run multiple networks, but it probably won't. If you get any standalone router running DD-WRT (and others, if you don't want a WRT router) you can put the modem in bridge mode and configure the router to do your routing.

DD-WRT multiple WLAN setup: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Multiple_WLANs
Cheap router with DD-WRT support: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833166064
Better router with DD-WRT support: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833162070

[Coaxial cable from the street] -> cable modem -> [ethernet cable] -> TimeCapsule - [wifi signal] -> MyComputer

We're all running Macs, not that it should matter. But both of our wifi network transmitters are TimeCapsules.

EDIT: just scrolled through your first link... imma gonna let you finish, but first I'll need a bit of time to really digest all that. I don't know what most of those acronyms stand for

 

[Zelig]

Oh, I've always just set up Mac servers running time machine, I didn't realize time capsules were actually routers.

You can plug in both time capsules to the modem, or if it only has one ethernet port you can get a 4-port gigabit switch for $20. Only config you'll need to do is set up channels to avoid overlapping frequencies as much as possible - it doesn't look like you can separately configure 2.4GHz and 5GHz on time capsules, but assuming 20MHz (which should be safe to assume for Apple devices) band mode on 2.4 GHz, channels 1, 6 and 11 are the only non-overlapping channels.

 

[peter grimes]

The other guy is looking into this as well - I just don't have as much time to research stuff just now, and I want to have a little understanding of what we're doing before we do it.

Thanks for the input - I'll focus my reading on that.

 

[peter grimes]

New twist:

We're going away for a month, and some acquaintances are going to be staying in our place. We kind of know them, but I don't want to leave them with the keys to the vault, so to speak.

rather than worry about them messing with the iMac (27" late 2010), I'm going to reformat the hard drive and reinstall OSX. It's not a big deal - I've been meaning to resize the windows partition for a while anyway, and I have to bring it in for the hard drive recall at some point, so it's as good a time as any to do it.

This way, when we get back from our trip, I will reformat the drive again (and resize the bootcamp partition), and restore the system from TimeCapsule.

But here's my question: What do I need to worry about with the TimeCapsule? I'm assuming that I shouldn't set up the 'vacation' system to back-up, right? And I'm assuming that I should make certain the TimeCapsule is securely password protected... but I want a second backup. Is there a way to backup the TimeCapsule?

Or is it better to do a backup of the iMac now, on a separate external drive? I have a 345 GB drive kicking around that I could use for that, assuming that's enough space.

 

[Cutlass]

Why don't you just take the computer out of your place and lock it in a storage room someplace while you're gone?

 

[Zelig]

You should be using a login password with FileVault2 anyway.

If timecapsules are like other time machine backups, you can enable filevault on them as well.

If you want to make another backup, I'd probably be lazy and just drag/drop everything from the computer to the external drive. Using Filevault still.

 

[peter grimes]

Why don't you just take the computer out of your place and lock it in a storage room someplace while you're gone?

We thought about it, but there's no TV or anything, and, well, I might just be overly cautious. It's not like these folks are creepy or anything.

In the past I've secured it off-site. But, well,... I'm just rambling now.

You should be using a login password with FileVault2 anyway.

If timecapsules are like other time machine backups, you can enable filevault on them as well.

If you want to make another backup, I'd probably be lazy and just drag/drop everything from the computer to the external drive. Using Filevault still.

I haven't been encrypting. I agree that I should start immediately.

I found a website that talks about how to configure TimeMachine to perform backups on multiple drives. I'm going to use an external and off-site it while we're gone. My external isn't large enough to do a straight copy, so I will use TimeMachine - pretty sure that has some compression.

 

[Zelig]

Time machine doesn't do any compression.