Home Networking Router
Basic Administration
This
Basic Networking Router Administration Can Be Your Fastest And Most Easiest
Way To Secure Your Network.
Once you have hooked up your
home network router and we have an address on the network,
its time to actually log into the network router and set up some of the
basic functions and change the factory default settings mainly for security,
especially if you have a wireless network router
One more thing before we go
though the networking router administration. In order to save you some
download time with regards to some of the images associated with this
page, I have decided to let you see a thumbnail image and allow you to
click on the image thumbnail to see an enlargement of the actual image.
Hopefully this makes it easier for you and less download time
too.
To actually access the networking
router, you will need to log in through a web page that resides on the
router, in our networking router example we are using the Linksys router
so it's defaults maybe be different than this example but just look around
it should be pretty similar. If you still get stuck just look at our computer
router home page and locate your router if you don't find it then just
send me an email and I will be happy to help.
So open up your web browser
and type the following address into the address line. "http//:192.168.0.1"
(just what is between the quotation marks). If you are not sure what the
default address of your networking router is, you can find it by by right
clicking on the network connection icon located in the notification area,
click status. Once the window opens click the "support tab".
Right in that window you will
see the "Default Gateway" and that is the actual address of your networking
router. So by typing that address into a web browser and you will access
the router's home page and in most cases this isn't true for the Apple
airport, but for most home networking routers, they are administered
via a web page.
So again, in your web browser
type 192.168.0.1 hit enter/returned and you will get the login screen
for your router. Now you can it's trying to connect, and there's the type
of router that I happen to be hooked up to and it is asking for my username
and password.
For every router it's different,
but for the Linksys networking router, the default is username: "admin"
and the password: is also "admin". So type that in now and then click
ok and you will be logged into the networking router administration page.
Click To Enlarge
You are now seeing a web page that
has actually been generated by the router itself. In other words, this
is a web page that is located in the router. So this is actually a good
network test as well. Because if you can access to this page, then your
network is working at least up to the router.
So if you can’t connect to
the Internet, but you can connect to this page, then you know the problem
isn't in your local network, it is probably on the other side of the router
like your cable modem or in the cable ISP connection.
So here is the basic set up,
we will change a few things right off the bat, I like to often change
the name of the router just because I like to name my own networks.
And maybe we'll call this one Home Networking Router, or what ever you
prefer is fine, just type in the name in the location provided.
.
Click To Enlarge
Click To Enlarge
Now, a little further down the page
is the network set up information and you can see the local IP address
which is the IP address of the router, by default it is 192.168.0.1. Now
the first two sets of digits 192.168, for the most part unless you know
what you're doing you really don’t want to change those because there
are certain sets of Internet addresses that are available for private
networks and there are certain set that available for public networks
and these have been preset for you a private (or home) network.
You can just leave all these
settings as they are it doesn't’t really give you any real security to
change them because it is pretty easy for people to find them even through
wireless.
Now you will notice that by
default all these routers are enabled for their DHCP
or dynamic host control protocol server. What this means is that the networking
router will handle all addressing needs and if you remember our networking
basics, this is one of the levels of connectivity needed for us to have
a network. It is that unique identifier that identifies your computer
on the home network and DHCP just means that the router will be the one
that hands our those addresses.
Anytime you add another computer,
it starts increasing those IP addresses for each computer on your home
network and it's going to start at 192.168.0 and will increase the last
set of number as follows 101, 102. 103 etc.and again, this is one of the
benefits of using a router, it pretty much takes care of it all for you
and it can do for up to 50 users.
Now especially if you have
a wireless router set up, but regardless you can limit the number of user
on your network, one kind of security you can add on the fly is that if
you know you only have five computers, you could limit this to five and
now no more than five people could log in at a time and if you five computers
and your network and a sixth person tried to get on and they weren't suppose
to be on your network the router wouldn't even give them an address. So
this is a kind of security that you can put in and we mention
again in wireless security. But you can also just leave it at the 50 and
let your network grow.
There are other settings such
as things like what they called DNS or domain name servers, these are
computers on the network that will take a Web address like www.domain.com
and turn it into one of these network numbers for the world to see which
is the way your computers locate each other, again you
don’t even have to touch that, but at least you know what it means.
Notice down at the
bottom and this is especially useful if you're using a router
for VPN, go ahead and find a setting for your local time zone and make
sure you change it to the actual time zone that you're in. So here I am
in Mountain Time, so I change this to my time zone so go ahead and change
it to your time zone by clicking the drop down list arrow and clicking
on your zone.
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Click To Enlarge
Now because this is a web page, you
need to save any changes before going on to another part of the page.
So look down at the bottom and click on “Save Settings”, and when they
are successful you will get a window that says, yup you guessed it, “Settings
are Successful”. Once it completes it will take you back to the router
web page.
Now you should see the changes you
made, i.e. name and time zone changes...
Very Important:
Another thing that you definitely want to do is go to the administration
tab on top click it and locate the router password. Which if you remember
is set to username = admin and password = admin as the factory default.
And you will be amazed at how many people leave them set as the default!
That is not good networking
router security so...
You will want to change the
password here on the administration page. All you do is enter a new password
and then enter it again just for confirmation, and then don’t forget to
“Save Settings”. If you did it right, you will see that “Setting are Successful”
window and so once again just click continue.
Click To Enlarge
Click To Enlarge
Now before you think you made a mistake…
You remember the last change
you just made? That's right, the password. So because you changed the
password and you are now being returned to the router’s admin page, you
are now required to log in again with the right password.
Now if you want and this is
a computer is on your regular network, and you know nobody is going to
walk off with it, like a wireless or laptop, you can go ahead and check
"remember my password" and now every time you log into the router, Widows
XP will remembers the password for you.
And so once you click ok you
will be logged into the Networking Router home page again.
One last thing that you can
see is that every router will have a current status window, so click status
and it is located in different places in different routers but this is
where it is located on the Linksys.
This gives you information
about your local network, like your name, your firmware version, which
is the software that's running on the router itself, and then also usually
in status you can find where the information is coming from the Internet.
You also have your IP address,
the router’s address which is different from yours, and then finally,
if you have internet connection, you would see that IP address which is
different from everything else on your network. That one is coming from
you ISP (Internet Service Provider).
So when you think of the Internet,
in some ways you can think of it as a router, to router, to router, to
router, to networking router connection. So I have my local network, the
next step in the system is my Internet Provider’s IP, then it continues
throughout the entire internet network.
Now once you got the networking
router set up, you're pretty much done setting up your home network and
you are good to go. There there's a few more settings that we changed
just for wireless networking routers and I talk about that under wireless
security.
Hope that helps, it is pretty
easy to take care of networking router administration because most of
the time the factory defaults will work as they are for the exception
of a couple of security issues which I cover in greater detail under router
security.
Have a great day and happy
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